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Logic of Bergson's Philosophy 

By 
GEORGE WILLIAMS PECKHAM, Jr. 



Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy 

Columbia University 



NEW YORK 
1917 



Logic of Bergson's Philosophy 

By 
GEORGE WILLIAMS PECKHAM, Jr. 



Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy 

Columbia University 



NEW YORK 
1917 



/* 









GUtt 
JuAX IS 1918 



UNIVERSITY PRINTING OFFICE 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

For help in preparing the present dissertation the author is obliged 
to Professor Dewey, under whose supervision the writing progressed; 
to Professor Woodbridge, who aided in projecting the plan of the work; 
and to Professors Montague and Bush, who contributed a number of 
important suggestions. Without transferring responsibility for what- 
ever contentions occur in this dissertation, the author desires to 
acknowledge his sense of gratitude for the very generous assistance 
rendered him by his advisers. 



[in] 



INTRODUCTION 

Like a number of other philosophical writers M. Bergson 
presupposes a world in which there are objects of knowledge and 
knowledges of these objects, the latter being true in the measure of 
their resemblance to what they are knowledges of; but more elabo- 
rately than any other philosopher, perhaps, he develops a consequence 
of this fundamental assumption, according to which a knowledge, to 
be absolutely true, must coincide with what it is knowledge of. He 
applies this supposition, along with its consequence, first to psychol- 
ogy, then to physics and biology, and, finally, to natural science as 
a whole. In Time and Free-Will he tries to effect a reform of psychol- 
ogy by making the mind it describes coincide with the object of 
psychological science, or immediate experience; in the sequel he 
repeats the attempt with regard to physics and biology. In other 
words, M. Bergson condemns whatever discrepancy he succeeds in 
discovering between science and concrete experience; he finds fault 
with science for being abstract and analytical, and his philosophy 
argues in favor of the validity of immediate intuition. It is not an 
unequivocal argument in favor of the doctrine of immediate intuition, 
however, for besides the difficulty of accounting for error in a doctrine 
that defines any object presented in consciousness as the truth of 
itself, an attack on the truth of the natural sciences, to carry weight, 
requires the provision of a substitute science. But — since formula- 
tions are abstract irremediably and experience concrete — in formu- 
lating a substitute science M. Bergson transgresses the fundamental 
assumption of his argument, which declares that as long as a discrep- 
ancy exists between knowledge and the object of knowledge, the 
latter must fall short of the absolute truth. Hence the most general 
characteristic of M. Bergson's logic: He discovers what he takes to 
be flaws of an epistemological order in natural science, and proposes 
a novel science in its place, in which the same flaws, or flaws of a 
similar sort, reappear. 

The capital significance of M. Bergson's writings, for technical phil- 
osophy, then, is to be found in the fact that he originally defines a 
psychology radically distinct from ordinary psychology ; a metaphysics 
of matter radically distinct from ordinary physics ; and a general meta- 
physics radically distinct from natural science, and relinquishes these 
distinctions one by one, identifying in principle the sciences he pro- 
poses as true, philosophically, with the sciences of nature he impugns 

[v] 



as invalid. This relinquishment is the chief source of the ambiguities 
that have frequently been noted in M. Bergson's writings, and which 
appear sometimes in sharp contradictions, but more often in the 
double or multiple meanings of the terms and definitions he employs; 
for in one form or another the ambiguity springing from this relin- 
quishment pervades M. Bergson's philosophy, and is the only element 
of logic common to his successive books and informing them with a 
significant systematic unity. As to the purport of the relinquishment 
we describe, it may mean that so fan as M. Bergson formulates a 
succeedaneous science he is false to the truth of his own inspiration — 
that, strictly speaking, philosophical truths are inexpressible in ab- 
stractions; or it may mean that M. Bergson's initial assumption 
should be renounced — that his need to fall back on the characteris- 
tics of natural science, with which he found fault, is evidence in favor 
of their philosophical validity. We prefer the latter of these alterna- 
tives, but the reader may make his choice without prejudice to the 
following exposition of the difficulties of M. Bergson's logic. 



[vi] 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

I Analysis of Time and Free-Will I 

Demonstration of M. Bergson's relinquishment of his novel 
psychology 27 

II Comparison of the relinquishment in Time and Free-Will with 
the relinquishment in 
Matter and Memory 34 

An Introduction to Metaphysics 48 

Creative Evolution . . ■ 53 

Summary 64 



TIME AND FREE-WILL 

We are concerned with Time and Free-Will , in this dissertation, in 
order to show that the book embodies a doctrine of mind no sooner 
formulated than renounced ; this demonstration in turn will contribute 
to prove that M. Bergson's philosophical work is a succession of 
attempts to set up a kind of cognition prescribed by a theory of knowl- 
edge; attempts which terminate in each case in an abdication of the 
theoretically necessitated results. But seeing that the doctrine of 
Time and Free-Will is difficult of comprehension in terms of itself, we 
propose to commence our introductory chapter with a general analysis 
of the book's contents, hoping that the evidence in favor of our pre- 
liminary proposition may be made unmistakably manifest by this 
means. 

We shall seek to derive the parts and details of Time and Free- Will 
from a small number of considerations, proceeding as though we were 
exhibiting the reasoning that guided M. Bergson in writing his book; 
if the reader should be disinclined to acquiesce in our analysis as an 
exposition of the influences that cooperated to produce M. Bergson's 
book, however, its acceptance as a classification of the logical elements 
of Time and Free- Will will be a sufficient concession for the purposes of 
our inquiry. 

In Time and Free-Will we discern the interaction of an hypothesis 
and a fact ; the hypothesis of dualism and the fact that associationistic 
psychology is incompetent to describe the immediate accurately in 
terms of its analytical elements — ideas, mental states, and atoms of 
mind — since the immediate is a combination of elements that inter- 
penetrate. For brevity's sake the fact that associationistic descriptions 
of the immediate are imperfect will be denominated the fact of unique- 
ness ; for the confluence of psychological elements in the immediate is, 
in another view, simply the fact that each phase of our immediate 
experience is unique. What, now, results from the interaction of the 
fact of uniqueness with the dualistic hypothesis? 

Traditional dualism — in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, for 
instance, — neglects to provide for the fact of uniqueness, and to make a 
provision for this fact in the dualistic hypothesis M. Bergson is forced 
to modify radically the correspondence aspect of the suoposition in 



2 LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 

which he starts; he is forced to infer that the mind of dualism, which 
he classifies with the fact of uniqueness, can have nothing in common 
with the matter of dualism, since if mind correspond to determined 
and possibly recurrent patterns of matter — a correspondence feasible 
if matter and mind have attributes in common — uniqueness will be 
reducible to some kind of a secondary phenomenon or mere appear- 
ance. The result of the combination, therefore, for dualism, is the 
isolation of mind from quantity in all its forms; mind becomes pure 
quality. 

Not only are the matter and mind of dualism absolutely separated 
by the logic that underlies Time and Free-Will , but the truth that 
the phases of the immediate come to us unanalyzed into psychological 
elements is modified thereby into a conviction, on M. Bergson's part, 
that the immediate has no magnitude of any sort; a modification 
encouraged by the dualistic dogma that the immediate is unextended. 
Thus the interaction of his premises makes M. Bergson believe that 
neither intensity nor multiplicity can rightly be predicated of immedi- 
ate experience. Consistently with this belief, how does he deal with 
the phenomena ordinarily described as mental intensity and multi- 
plicity? 

His treatment of these quantitative aspects of experience follows 
from the interaction of his premises as indicated already. If psychic 
magnitude, so-called, is not psychic, dualism presents no alternative 
to the view that it must be material qua magnitude; and since the 
material division of the dualistic world is defined as characteristically 
spatial, M. Bergson is led to conclude that magnitude of the intensive 
and numerical sorts must be spatial — somehow. His treatment of 
immediate experience is thus an attempt to reduce its intensity and 
multiplicity to space, and issues in the claim that immediate experi- 
ence, minus intensity, multiplicity, and extension, is real, pure, per- 
fect, or veritable mind. 

Having, that is, observed that experience is no accumulation of 
particles of a constitutive material, M. Bergson transfers his faith in 
this fact to conclusions that flow from the fact interpreted in the 
assumption of the truth of the dualistic hypothesis. He believes that 
the phenomena of psychic magnitude are illegitimate and illusory, 
and the problem devolves upon him quite naturally: Whence comes 
the notion, entertained in both science and common sense, that the 
psychic has magnitude? This notion, he pronounces, originates in a 
"confusion" of the psychic with space. 

M. Bergson consequently commences his discussion of intensity in 
Time and Free-Will with the question: By what means are intensities 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 

transformed into magnitudes? Inasmuch as the origin and bearing 
of this question are not clearly explained by the author of Time and 
Free-Will, its readers may find themselves in a quandary concerning 
the drift of the opening discussion of the book; a quandary, moreover, 
not entirely likely to be dispelled by a further reading in Time and 
Free-Will, for reasons to which we must next proceed to devote a few 
moments of attention. 

The interaction of the premises of M. Bergson's argument, we 
repeat, brings him to believe that the immediate is non-intensive and 
non-multiple, as well as being unextended. Nevertheless a difficulty 
confronts him when he attempts an exposition of the consequences of 
this belief; for, as a matter of fact, the immediate is intensive and 
numerical and extended; or, in other words, qualitative mind and 
quantitative matter are mingled together in the world that crowds 
itself on our senses. How then does M. Bergson harmonize with his 
belief that the immediate is nothing but quality the fact that it is a 
mixture of quality and quantity? He achieves this by varying the 
sense in which he affirms the conversion of space into psychic inten- 
sity and multiplicity; by varying, that is, the sense of the "confusion" 
by which the idea of mental growth (or intensity), and mental parts 
(or multiplicity), gains currency — according to himself — in science 
and common sense. This ambiguous employment of the concept of 
' 'confusion" gives rise to a sense of intangible issues that is likely to 
beset the reader of Time and Free-Will from the opening of the book 
to its close; for the cause that requires M. Bergson to temper his 
general assertion that quality and quantity are not mingled at all acts 
to modify each one of his specific assertions that mind is non- 
quantitative. 

Thus in Chapter I of Time and Free-Will M. Bergson affirms 
that the mind can not manifest intensity, but tempers his affirmation 
to the statement that if mind is intensive it ought not to be so; and 
this to the assertion that mind is intensive ; — modulating these proposi- 
tions into each other by a number of means we shall scrutinize pres- 
ently. In Chapter II of his book he affirms that mind: is not 
— is illegitimately — and positively is — multiple. Believing that mental 
magnitudes, so-called, are spatialities, he affirms concomitantly that 
mind: is not — is in a way — and quite is — extended. Since quantita- 
tive mind is analyzable, subject to associationism's laws, repetitious, 
and capable of manifesting causal sequences, we discover M. Bergson 
asserting, in the latter portion of his book, that analytical formulations 
of mind are: false — semi-false — true; that the laws of associationism 
are: valid and invalid; that psychic change proceeds into pure novelty: 



4 LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 

always — usually — hardly ever; and that freedom of the will is: cer- 
tain — probable — possible. But before adducing evidence in support 
of the analysis we are introducing, we must point out one or two 
further peculiarities of the doctrine of Time and Free-Will, coordinate 
with those we have mentioned, or consecutive upon them. 

As M. Bergson's initial observation that the immediate is not a 
congeries of particles of mind-stuff refutes associationistic psychology, 
it likewise refutes the idea that we immediately experience moments 
of time; the idea that the phases of our lives are distinct as a multitude 
of beads on a wire are distinct ; for actually the instants of immediate 
experience fuse at their edges and intermingle and overlap. M. 
Bergson, therefore, was convinced directly that the temporal dimen- 
sion is incommensurable with immediate experience, and this convic- 
tion united in his mind with the belief that the immediate can not 
be multiple (indirectly derived from the attempt to legitimatize uni- 
queness in the dualistic hypothesis), to bring out the inference that 
the homogeneous time of physics is not time, really (time being by 
tradition the form of inner sensibility and therefore experienced imme- 
diately), but — as a spurious magnitude of the immediate — space; and 
the further inference that the material world is remote from veritable 
duration and change. M. Bergson supported his consequent attempt 
to reduce homogeneous time to space on the fact that in mathematical 
physics time is relational; and the importance, in his eyes, of the 
relativity of time doubtless encouraged his identification of duration 
with mind; an identification with advantages of an expositional order 
as well. 

But against the thesis that duration is heterogeneous purely stands 
the general impediment to M. Bergson's belief that mind is pure 
quality, the specific difficulty, in this case, that immediate experience 
constitutes the multiple hours and years of our lives. Hence arises 
an ambiguity in Time and Free-Will as to the measure in which 
heterogeneous time is spatial, leading to ambiguities as to whether 
the material world is changeless; whether motion is spatial; whether 
the conservation of energy is valid universally; and so forth. 

M. Bergson, to recapitulate, starts from the fact that the immediate 
is unique. Interpreting this fact on the basis of dualism he infers 
that mind is non-quantitative; that intensity and multiplicity are 
spatial ; and that mental intensity and multiplicity arise by an illegiti- 
mate "confusion" of the psychic with space; he supposes that the 
undoing of this " confusion" of quantity with quality will establish 
a psychological science and effect a reform in philosophy. But to 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 5 

demonstrate the confusion of the psychic with space is to prove the 
hypothesis of dualism erroneous — is to refute one premise of the 
argument of Time and Free-Will. The essential meaning of this 
contradiction must be investigated in a more ample context as soon 
as the preceding analysis has been substantiated. 

We begin by directing the attention of the reader to two or three 
curious facts about Time and Free-Will, which can easily be explained 
in our analysis. 

We remark first that, supposing that M. Bergson's convictions in 
the subject of intensity and multiplicity originated in his pre-occupa- 
tion with the uniqueness of the immediate, or, in other words, with 
the novelty of mind or the freedom of the will; and supposing that 
these convictions were deductions as to what would have to be true 
to make the freedom of the will, in the sense of the uniqueness of the 
immediate, legitimate in the dualistic hypothesis; — it is then com- 
prehensible that Chapter III of Time and Free- Will should be logi- 
cally independent of the earlier chapters. For Chapter III is 
M. Bergson's fundamental argument on the uniqueness of the imme- 
diate, in relation to which Chapters I and II, on intensity and 
multiplicity, are, in a logical view, little more than elaborations of 
detail. On this supposition, for example, it is comprehensible in par- 
ticular why M. Bergson should repeat his reduction of time to space, 
giving it in Chapter III (pp. 190-199), and in Chapter II (pp. 85- 
128), since, inasmuch as the premises of Chapters I and II are 
really presented in Chapter III, it is necessary to repeat these prem- 
ises, to a certain extent, in the earlier chapters, in order to give coher- 
ence to the argument on magnitude; the alternative being to leave 
that argument in the air; a procedure preferred by M. Bergson in the 
division of that argument relating to intensity. Analogously, our 
analysis explains why one is likely to have the unwonted impression, 
in reading the book, of proceeding through a series of unsound argu- 
ments to a sound conclusion; because the conclusion is a fact by 
itself, apart from the modification of dualism undertaken to insure 
its theoretical legitimacy; and because dualism, in the event, turns 
out gravely to compromise the fact of uniqueness by the curious 
results of their combination. 

A more interesting peculiarity in the doctrine of Time and Free- Will, 
which would be difficult to explain without the aid of a supposition 
such as the one we propose, is that the arguments by which M. Berg- 
son attempts to prove that the immediate manifests, genuinely, 
neither growth nor diminution, nor number, are arguments of an 



6 LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 

arbitrary nature, evidently suggested to M. Bergson by his great 
ingenuity, in support of conclusions reached independently of them; 
as is clear from this, that they are slight in proportion to the im- 
portance of the propositions he means them to demonstrate, and 
contradict, markedly, the general contentions of his book. We will 
take up the case of number to begin with. 

We said that M. Bergson concluded from the fact of uniqueness 
that mind has no magnitude, and therefore no multiplicity, and that 
number must be material and consequently spatial. This explains 
why, on assigned grounds of no philosophical value, and against the 
consensus of opinion among mathematicians he tries to demonstrate 
that space is implied in number. His argument (p. 76) is this: that 
number implies space since counting means thinking together, and 
that things can only be assembled in space. He forestalls the objec- 
tion that the units of a sum might be added in time by saying (p. 79) 
that it is necessary that each term of the series " . . . should wait 
. to be added to the others; but how could it wait if it were 
nothing but an instant of duration? And where could it wait if we 
did not localize it in space? . . . when we add to the present 
moment those which have preceded . . . as . . . when we are 
adding up units, we are not dealing with these moments themselves, 
since they have vanished forever, but with the lasting traces which 
they seem to have left in space . . . ." (cf. p. 87). In other words, 
M. Bergson argues that the past has got to be saved up somewhere — 
not in time, which is past, but in space, which resembles, in his 
argument, a pane of glass which each bit of passing duration is imag- 
ined to scratch. We judge this argument an expedient not alone on 
account of its slightness, nor because M. Bergson maintains in general 
that the past is stored up by time, but because, besides, he denies 
explicitly a few pages further along (p. 108. cf. pp. 116, 120) that space 
has the faculty of saving up what is past. 

Next intensity. M. Bergson is persuaded that mind has no quan- 
tity and is therefore incapable of growth or diminution ; that when it 
changes, its alteration is not intensive, but ever into new quality, 
as though its change went in no direction or dimension, but invari- 
ably, so to say, round a corner. Whatever intensity may wrongfully 
be discovered in such a process, M. Bergson is convinced from before- 
hand, must come from space. Arbitrary, in consequence, are the 
analyses of Chapter I of Time and Free-Will, which simply point 
out, in the case of one sort of psychic change after another, that 
where common sense and science take for granted a single kind of 
mental quality increasing or diminishing, there is really a series of 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 7 

distinct qualities with nothing in common, joined through "confusion" 
by pseudo-intervals that can be traced back to space. As both 
qualities and intervals, mind and space, are present in the immediate, 
M. Bergson can arbitrarily stress the former and disparage the latter 
in a multitude of ways without any difficulty. For instance, he 
describes an increasing intensity of pity as really (p. 19) : * ' . . .a 
transition from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from 
sympathy itself to humility." Or again, he writes (p. 47): "When, 
you say that a pressure on your hand becomes stronger and stronger, 
see whether you do not mean that there was first a contact, then a 
pressure, afterwards a pain, and that this pain itself, after having 
gone through a series of qualitative changes, has spread further and 
further over the surrounding region. Look again and see whether 
you do not bring in the more and more intense, i. e., more and more 
extended, effort of resistance . . . ." The final portion of this 
discussion of intensity (pp. 52-72) is an attempt to show that psycho- 
physics is theoretically absurd since it assumes that the qualities in 
a series of sensations, produced by a continuous increase in the exter- 
nal cause, are connected by quantitative intervals, whereas (p. 66) : 
" . . . not only are you unable to explain in what sense this transi- 
tion is a quantity, but reflection will show you that it is not even a 
reality; the only realities are the states S and S' through which I pass. " 
"The mistake which Fechner made . . , was that he believed 
in an interval between two successive sensations S and S' . . . " 
(p. 67). But this runs counter to M. Bergson's general logic, for 
he usually insists that change in mind is continuous, and states of 
mind not philosophically real. Let us now go on to the substantiation 
of our analysis by the citation of the contradictions into which we 
said that M. Bergson must fall. 

We said that M. Bergson's premises produce the conclusion that 
quality and quantity, or mind and matter, are separate; but that 
since quality and quantity are mingled in the immediate as a matter 
of fact, he is led to modify this theoretical contention; and that inas- 
much as his original premises force him to conclude that intensity 
and number are spatial, and as intensity and number are predicable of 
what passes for mind, M. Bergson's logic develops into a proof that 
the immediate, or mind, is partly spatial, that quality and quantity 
are mingled in a sense; although the mingling is disparaged as a "con- 
fusion" to be done away with for the purposes of philosophy. The am- 
biguity inherent in the employment of the concept "confusion," we said, 
is apparent in every topic, very nearly, treated in Time and Free-Will. 



8 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

Quality and Quantity in General. " . . . there is no point of 
contact between . . . quality and quantity " (p. 70). But we "con- 
ventionally assimilate" them; " . . . the more our knowledge 
increases, the more we perceive . . . quantity behind quality, the 
more also we tend to thrust the former into the latter . . . " (p. 70). 
In fact: " . . . the confusion of quality with quantity" if confined 
to the phenomena of consciousness taken separately " would give rise 
to obscurities . . . rather than problems. But by . intro- 

ducing space into our perception of duration, it corrupts our feeling 
of . change, of movement, and of freedom" (p. 74). Indeed, 

"the problem of freedom . . . has its origin in the illusion through 
which we confuse . . . quality and quantity" (p. 240). Yet else- 
where: " . . . every phenomenon" in the physical world "is there 
presented under two aspects, the one qualitative and the other 
extensive . . . " (p. 63). " . . . physical phenomena . . , 
are distinguished by quality not less than by quantity . . . 
(p. 204). 1 

Psychic Intensity in General. "The intensity of a simple state 
. is not quantity, but its qualitative sign. You will find that 
it arises from a compromise between pure quality, which is the state 
of consciousness, and pure quantity, which is necessarily space. Now 
you give up this compromise . . . when you study external things 
. Why, then, do you keep this hybrid concept when you 
analyze . . . the state of consciousness? If magnitude, outside you, 
is never intensive, intensity, within you, is never magnitude" (p. 224). 
But, at another point of the argument, "Shall we call the intensity of 
light a quantity, or shall we treat it as a quality" (p. 50)? "The 
sensations of sound display well-marked degrees of intensity" (p. 43). 
" The intensity of sensations varies with the external cause . . .how 
shall we explain the presence of quantity in an effect which is inex- 
tensive . . . " (p. 32) ? 2 

Psychic Multiplicity. " . . . the multiplicity of conscious states, 
regarded in its original purity, is not at all like the discrete multi- 
plicity which goes to form a number (p. 121) . . . there is . . . 
multiplicity without quantity. ... I said that several conscious 
states are organized into a whole . . . but the very use of the word 
'several' shows that I had already isolated these states ... by 
the very language which I was compelled to use I betrayed the deeply 
ingrained habit of setting out time in space. From this spatial 

1 Cf. especially pp. 34, 35. 64, 109, no, 112, 121, 124, 125, 213, 217, 225, 230, 231, 239; and pp. 72, 73, 
74, 120, 126, 130, 181, 209, 210, 218, 22.^, 224, 227, 228, 229. 
? C/. Chapter I, passim 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 9 

setting out ... we are compelled to borrow terms which we use 
to describe the state of mind . . . these terms are . . . mislead- 
ing . . . the idea of a multiplicity without relation to number or 
space, although clear for pure reflective thought, can not be trans- 
lated into the language of common sense" (p. 122). "... con- 
scious life displays two aspects according as we perceive it directly or 
by refraction through space. Considered in themselves, the deep- 
seated states have no relation to quantity, they are pure quality" 
(p- 137)- "We should . . . distinguish two . . . aspects of 
conscious life . . . below the self with well-defined states a self 
in which succeeding each other means melting into one another . . . 
But we are generally content with the first, i. e., with the shadow of 
the self . . . Consciousness . . . substitutes the symbol for the 
reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the 
self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better 
adapted to the requirements of social life . . . consciousness pre- 
fers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self" (p. 128). 
11 . . . our ego comes in contact with the external world at its 
surface (p. 125) . . . the mutual externality which material objects 
gain from their juxtaposition in homogeneous space . . . spreads 
into the depths of consciousness: little by little our sensations are 
distinguished from one another . . . and our feelings or ideas come 
to be separated like the sensations with which they are contempora- 
neous" (p. 126). "How could this self, which distinguishes external 
objects so sharply . . . withstand the temptation to introduce the 
same distinctions into its own life and to replace the interpenetration 
of its psychic states, their wholly qualitative multiplicity, by a numeri- 
cal plurality of terms ...?... In place of an inner life 
whose successive phases, each unique of its kind, can not be expressed 
in the fixed terms of language, we get a self which can be artificially 
reconstructed, and simple psychic states which can be added . . . 
Now, this must not be thought to be a mode of symbolical representa- 
tion only, for immediate intuition and discursive thought are one in 
concrete reality, and the very mechanism by which we only meant 
at first to explain our conduct will end by also controlling it. Our 
psychic states, separating then from each other, will get solidified 
. . ." (p. 236). In chapter one the distinct plurality of psychic 
elements is an explicit part of the argument on intensity. 3 

Analysis. "The feeling . . . is a being which lives . . . be- 
cause the duration in which it develops is a duration whose moments 

•See especially pp. 8, io, 26, 31, 57. Cf. pp. 84, 99. 100, 104, 105, 120, 131, 132, 136, 162, 163, 
164, 176, 196, 211, 216, 218, 226, 229, 235. 



10 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

permeate one another. By separating these moments from each other, 
by spreading out time in space, we have caused this feeling to 
lose its life . . . we believe that we have analyzed our feeling, 
while we have really replaced it by a juxtaposition of lifeless states 

. . . if some bold novelist . . . shows us under . . . this jux- 
taposition of simple states an infinite permeation ... we commend 
him . . . however . . . the very fact that he spreads out our 
feeling in a homogeneous time, and expresses its elements by words, 
shows that he in his turn is only offering us its shadow" (p. 132). 
" . . .a feeling . . . contains an indefinite plurality of con- 
scious states: but the plurality will not be observed unless it is, as 
it were, spread out in . . . space. We shall then perceive terms 
external to one another, and these terms will no longer be the states 
of consciousness themselves, but their symbols, or, speaking more 
exactly, the words which express them. ... As soon as we try to 
analyze" a conscious state, it "will be resolved into impersonal ele- 
ments . . . But because our reason . . . draws these multiple 
elements out of the whole, it does not follow that they were contained 
in it. For within the whole they did not occupy space and did not 
care to express themselves by means of symbols" (p. 162). " . . . 
we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, 
but not duration. Or, if we persist in analyzing it, we unconsciously 
transform the process into a thing, duration into extensity . . ." 
(p. 219). " . . . even in the cases where the action is freely per- 
formed, we can not reason about it without setting out its conditions 
externally to one another, therefore in space and no longer in duration" 
(p. 240). The "breaking up of the constituent elements of an idea, 
which issues in abstraction, is too convenient for us to do without 
it in ordinary life and even in philosophical discussion. But when 

. . . substituting for the interpenetration of the real terms the 
juxtaposition of their symbols, we claim to make duration out of 
space, we invariably fall into the mistakes of associationism " (p. 134). 4 
Associationism. "Associationism . . . makes the mistake of con- 
stantly replacing the concrete phenomenon which takes place in the 
mind by the artificial reconstruction of it given by philosophy . . 
(p. 163). "The associationist reduces the self to an aggregate of 
conscious states . . . But if he sees in these . . . states . . . 
only their impersonal aspect, he may set them side by side forever 
without getting anything but . . . the shadow of the ego projecting 
itself into space" (p. 165). " . . .in proportion as the conditions 
of social life are . . . realized . . . our conscious states . . . 

*Cf. pp. 128, 129, 130, 176, 177, 200. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY II 

are made into objects or things. . . . Henceforth we no longer 
perceive them except in the homogeneous medium in which we have 
set their image. . . . Thus a second self is formed which obscures 
the first, a self whose existence is made up of distinct moments, whose 
states are separated from one another and easily expressed in words. 
I do not mean, here, to split up the personality, nor to bring back in 
another form the numerical multiplicity which I shut out at the 
beginning. It is the same self which perceives distinct states at first, 
and which by afterwards concentrating its attention, will see these 
states melt into one another like the crystals of a snowflake when 
touched for some time with the finger. And in truth, for the sake of 
language, the self has everything to gain by not bringing back confu- 
sion where' order reigns, and in not upsetting this ingenious arrange- 
ment of almost impersonal states. . . . An inner life with well- 
distinguished moments and with clearly characterized states will 
answer better the requirements of social life. Indeed, a superficial 
psychology may be content with describing it without thereby falling 
into error, on condition, however, that it restricts itself to the study 
of what has taken place and leaves out what is going on" (p. 138). 5 

Mind in Relation to Repetition. "As we are not accustomed to 
observe ourselves directly . . . we . . . believe that real dura- 
tion ... is the same as the duration which glides over the inert 
atoms without penetrating . . . them. Hence it is that we do not 
see any absurdity in putting things back in their place after a lapse of 
time, in supposing the same motives acting afresh on the same per- 
sons. . . . That such an hypothesis has no real meaning is what 
we shall show later on" (p. 154). "To say that the same inner causes 
will reproduce the same effects is to assume that the same cause can 
appear a second time on the stage of consciousness. Now, if duration 
is what we say, deep-seated psychic states are radically heterogeneous 
to each other. . . . It is no use arguing that, even if there are no 
two deep-seated psychic states which are altogether alike, yet analysis 
would resolve these different states into more general and homogene- 
ous elements. . . . This would be to forget that even the simplest 
psychic elements possess a personality and life of their own, however 
superficial they may be . . ." (p. 199). The " intuition of a homo- 
geneous medium . . . enables us to externalize our concepts in 
relation to one another . . . and thus ... by getting everything 
ready for language . . . prepares the way for social life (p. 236). 
. In place of a heterogeneous duration whose moments perme- 
ate one another, we . . . get a homogeneous time, whose moments 

5 Cf. pp. 135, 158, 161, 162, 164, 168, 226, 237. 



12 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

are strung on a spatial line. In place of an inner life whose successive 
phases, each unique of its kind, can not be expressed in the fixed terms 
of language, we get a self which can be artificially reconstructed, and 
simple psychic states which can be added. . . . Our psychic states, 
separating then from each other, will get solidified . . . little by 
little, as our consciousness thus imitates the process by which nervous 
matter procures reflex actions, automatism will cover over freedom. 

. . . at this point . . . the associationists . . . come in 

. . . As they look at only the commonest aspect of our conscious 
life, they perceive clearly marked states, which can recur in time like 
physical phenomena . . ." (p. 237). 6 

Homogeneous Time. " : . .if space is to be defined as . . . 
homogeneous, it seems that . . . every homogeneous medium will 
be space. For, homogeneity . . . consisting in the absence of 

. . . quality, it is hard to see how two forms of the homogeneous 
could be distinguished. . . . We may therefore surmise that time, 
conceived under the form of a homogeneous medium, is some spurious 
concept, due to the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of 
pure consciousness" (p. 98). " . . . time conceived under the 
form of a . . . homogeneous medium, is nothing but the ghost of 
space haunting the reflective consciousness" (p. 99). "There are 
. two possible conceptions of time, the one free from all alloy, 
the other surreptitiously bringing in the idea of space" (p. 100). 
" . . . from the moment . . . you attribute the least homo- 
geneity to duration, you . . . introduce space" (p. 104). " . . . 
it will be said . . . that the time which . . . our clocks divide 

. . . must be a measurable and therefore homogeneous magni- 
tude. It is nothing of the sort . . . and a close examination will 
dispel this last illusion" (p. 107). "It is . . . obvious that, if it 
did not betake itself to a symbolical substitute, our consciousness 
would never regard time as a homogeneous medium. . . . But we 
naturally reach this symbolical representation . . . Principally by 
the help of motion . . . duration assumes the form of a homo- 
geneous medium, and . . . time is projected into space. But 

. . . any repetition of a well-marked external phenomenon would 
suggest to consciousness the same mode of representation. Thus 

. . . we are necessarily led to the idea of a homogeneous time, 
the symbolical image of real duration" (p. 124). "... daily 
experience ought to teach us to distinguish between duration as 
quality . . . and time so to speak materialized" (p. 127). "Below 
homogeneous duration ... a close psychological analysis distin- 

6 Cf. PP. 200, 201, 219, 239. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 13 

guishes a duration whose heterogeneous moments permeate one 
another ..." (p. 128). 7 

Relation of the Material World to Time. ' ' To put duration in space 
is . . .to contradict oneself. ... we must not say that external 
things endure, but rather that there is in them some inexpressible 
reason in virtue of which we can not examine them at successive 
moments of our own duration without observing that they have 
changed" (p. 227). "It . . . follows that there is neither duration 
nor even succession in space, if we give to these words the meaning in 
which consciousness takes them: each of the so-called successive 
states of the external world exists alone; their multiplicity is real 
only for a consciousness that can first retain them and then set them 
side by side by externalizing them in relation to one another" (p. 120). 
"It is because I endure . . . that I picture to myself what I call 
the past oscillations of the pendulum at the same time as I perceive 
the present oscillation. Now, let us withdraw . . . the ego which 
thinks these so-called successive oscillations: there will never be more 
than a single oscillation . . . hence no duration. . . . within our 
ego there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego 

. . . mutual externality without succession ... no succession, 
since succession exists solely for a conscious spectator who keeps the 
past in mind. . . . Now, between this succession without exter- 
nality and this externality without succession, a kind of exchange 
takes place . . . similar to what physicists call . . . endosmosis. 

. . . the oscillations of the pendulum . . . profit . . . from 
the influence which they have exercised over our conscious life. Owing 
to the fact that our consciousness has organized them as a whole in 
memory, they are first perceived and afterwards disposed in a series: 
in a word, we create for them a fourth dimension of space, which we 
call homogeneous time . . ." (p. 108). " . . . science seems to 
point to many cases where we anticipate the future. Do we not 
determine beforehand . . . the greater number of astronomical 
phenomena? . . . No doubt. . . . Indeed . . . the reasons 
which render it possible to foretell an astronomical phenomenon are 
the very ones which prevent us from determining in advance an act 
which springs from our free activity. For the future of the material 
universe, although contemporaneous with the future of a conscious 
being, has no analogy to it" (p. 192). 8 

Spatiality of Motion. " . . . to . . . confusion between motion 
and . . . space . . . the paradoxes of the Eleatics are due; for 

7 Cf. pp. 106, no, ns, 116, 120, 131, 181, 188, 193, 194, 19s, 196, 197, 198, 218, 226, 228, 229, 
230, 238. 

8 Cf. especially pp. 116, 205, 206. 



14 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

the interval which separates two points is infinitely divisible, and if 
motion consisted of parts . . . the interval would never be crossed. 
. . . This is what Zeno leaves out of account . . . forgetting 
that space alone can be divided and . . . confusing space with 
motion. Hence we do not think it necessary to admit ... a 
discrepancy between real and imaginary motion. . . . Why resort 
to an . . . hypothesis . . . about . . . motion, when imme- 
diate intuition shows us motion within duration, and duration outside 
space" (p. 112)? "We generally say that a movement takes place 
in space. . . . Now, if we reflect ... we shall see that the suc- 
cessive positions of the moving body . . . occupy space, but that 
the process by which it passes from one position to the other . . . 
eludes space. . . . motion . . . is a mental synthesis, a psychic 
and therefore unextended process" (p. no). "This is just the 
idea of motion which we form when we think of it by itself, when, so 
to speak, from motion we extract mobility. ... A rapid gesture 
made with the eyes shut, will assume for consciousness the form of a 
purely qualitative sensation as long as there is no thought of the space 
traversed. In a word, there are two elements to be distinguished in 
motion, the space traversed and the act by which we traverse it, the 
successive positions and the synthesis of these positions. The first of 
these elements is a homogeneous quantity; the second has no reality 
except in a consciousness: it is a quality. . . . But here again we 
meet with a case of endosmosis, an intermingling of the . . . sensa- 
tion of mobility with the . . . representation of the space tra- 
versed. ... we attribute to the motion the divisibility of the space 
which it traverses and . . . accustom ourselves to projecting this 
act itself into space . . . as if . . . localizing ... a progress 
in space did not amount to asserting that, even outside consciousness, 
the past co-exists along with the present" (p. in). 9 

Does Mind Always Progress into Novelty? " . . . the process of 
our free activity goes on . . .in the obscure depths of consciousness 
at every moment of duration . . ." (p. 237, note). "... deter- 
minism can not help substituting words for . . . the ego itself. By 
giving the person . . . a fixed form by means of sharply defined 
words, it deprives" the person "of living activity. . . . But this 
mechanism . . . can not hold good against the witness of an atten- 
tive consciousness, which shows us inner dynamism as a fact" (p. 171). 
" . . . freedom must be sought in a certain . . . quality of the 
action itself. . . . The difficulty arises from the fact that both 
parties" (to the dispute over freedom) "picture the deliberation under 

9 Cf. pp. 49, 107, 120, 124. 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 15 

the form of an oscillation in space, while it really consists in a dynamic 
progress in which the self and its motives . . . are in a constant 
state of becoming. The self, infallible when it affirms its immediate 
experiences, feels itself free and says so ; but as soon as it tries to explain 
its freedom to itself, it no longer perceives itself except by a kind of 
refraction through space" (p. 182). " . . . . we are free when our 
acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it" (p. 172). 
"Freedom . . . is not absolute . . . it admits of degrees . . . 
many live . . . and die without having known true freedom. . . . 
the most authoritative education would not curtail any of our freedom 
if it only imparted to us ideas and feelings capable of impregnating the 
whole soul" (p. 166). " . . .we are rarely free. ... To act 
freely is to . . . get back into pure duration" (p. 231). " . . . 
although we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, 
it seldom happens that we are willing" (p. 240). 10 

The Problem of Free- Will. " ■. . . the confusion of quality and 
quantity . . . gives rise to the problem of free-will. . . . instead 
of seeking to solve the question we shall show the mistake of those 
who ask it" (p. 74). "defenders and opponents of free-will agree in 
holding that . . . action is preceded by a kind of mechanical oscil- 
lation between . . . two points X and Y . . . " (p. 179). But 
"do not ask me whether the self . . . could or could not choose Y: 
I should answer that the question is meaningless. ... To ask such 
a question is to admit the possibility of adequately representing time 
by space . . ." (p. 180). " . . . it is . . . devoid of mean- 
ing to ask: Could" an "act be foreseen, given . . . its antecedents " 
(p. 189)? " . . . when we ask whether a future action could 
have been foreseen, we unwittingly identify that time with which we 
have to do in the exact sciences . . . with real duration, whose 
so-called quantity is really a quality . . ." (p. 197). "In whatever 
way . . . freedom is viewed, it can not be denied except on condi- 
tion of identifying time with space . . ." (p. 230). "The problem 
of freedom has thus sprung from a misunderstanding ... it has 
its origin in the illusion through which we confuse succession and 
simultaneity, duration and extensity, quality and quantity" (p. 240). 
But: "freedom is denounced as being incompatible with . . . the 
conservation of energy . ..." (p. 142) and although "the parallel- 
ism of the physical and psychical series has been proved in a fairly 
large number of cases ... to extend this parallelism to the series 
themselves in their totality is to settle a priori the problem of freedom " 
(p. 147). " f . . while the material point, as mechanics under- 

10 Cf. pp. 165, 168, 169, 170, 220, 229, 233, 237. 



16 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

stands it, remains in an eternal present, the past is a reality . . .for 
conscious beings. . . . Such being the case, is there not much to 
be said for the hypothesis of a conscious force or free-will, which, 
subject to the action of time and storing up duration, may thereby 
escape the law of the conservation of energy" (p. 153)? 

The Conservation of Energy. (A compendium of M. Bergson's argu- 
ment, in his own words.) " . . . freedom is denounced as being 
incompatible with the . . . conservation of energy. . . . We shall 
show that . . . physical determinism, involves a psychological 
hypothesis" (p. 142). "As . . . the conservation of energy has 
been assumed to admit of no exception, there is not an atom," it is 
supposed, ". . . whose position is not determined by the . . . 
actions which the other atoms exert upon it. And the mathematician 
. . . could calculate . . . the future actions of the person 
. as one predicts an astronomical phenomenon. We shall not 
raise any difficulty about recognizing that this conception of . . , 
nervous phenomena . . . is a natural deduction from the law of 
the conservation of energy. . . . but ... we propose to show 
that . . . the very universality of the principle of the conserva- 
tion of energy can not be admitted except in virtue of some psycho- 
logical hypothesis. . . . if we assumed . . . the position . . . 
of each atom of cerebral matter . . . determined at every moment 
of time, it would not follow that our psychic life is subject to the same 
necessity. For we should first have to prove that a strictly deter- 
mined psychic state corresponds to a definite cerebral state, and the 
proof is still to be given (p. 144). . . . But . . . we do not prove 
and we shall never prove by any reasoning that the psychic fact is 
fatally determined by the molecular movement. . . .the unvarying 
conjunction of the two terms has not been verified . . . except in 
a . . . limited number of cases. . . . But it is easy to under- 
stand why physical determination extends this conjunction to all 
possible cases. . . . the majority of our actions can be explained 
by motives. But . . . the determinist, . . . led astray by a con- 
ception of duration ... we shall criticise later, holds that the 
determination of conscious states by«one another is absolute. . . . 
It seems natural that this . . . approximate determinism should 
seek support from the same mechanism that underlies the phenomena 
of nature (p. 147). . . . the transaction would be to the advantage 
both of psychological determinism . . . and of physical determi- 
nism, which would spread over everything. . . . The physical deter- 
minism reached in this way is nothing but psychological determinism, 
seeking to verify itself . . . by an appeal to the sciences of nature. 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 17 

But we must own that the amount of freedom left . . . after com- 
plying with the . . . conservation of energy is . . . limited 
(p. 149). . . . We are thus led to inquire whether the very extension 
of the principle of the conservation of energy to all bodies in nature 
does not involve some psychological theory, and whether the scientist 
who did not possess . . . any prejudice against human freedom 
would think of setting up this principle as a universal law (p. 150). 

. . . The . . . conservation of energy certainly seems to apply 

to the whole range of psychico-chemical phenomena. But . . . the 

study of physiological phenomena" might "reveal . . . some new 

. . energy which may" rebel "against calculation. Physical 

science would not thereby lose any of its . . . geometrical rigor. 

. . . Let us also note that the . . . conservation of energy can 
only be applied to a system of which the points . . . can return 
to their former positions. This return is at least conceived of as 
possible . . . and the instinctive . . . belief of mankind in the 
conservation of a fixed quantity ... of energy, perhaps has its root 
in the very fact that inert matter does not seem to . preserve any 

trace of past time. But this is not the case in the realm of life. Here 
. . the idea of putting things back in their place at the end of a 
certain time involves a kind of absurdity. . . . But let us admit 
that the absurdity is a mere appearance ... at least it will be 
granted that the hypothesis of a turning backwards is almost meaning- 
less in the sphere of conscious states. . . . the past is a reality 
perhaps for living bodies, and certainly for conscious beings (p. 151). 

. . . In truth it is not a wish to meet the requirements of positive 
science, but rather a psychological mistake which has caused this 
abstract principle of mechanics to be set up as a universal law (p. 154). 

. . . while we ought to say (if we kept aloof from all presupposi- 
tions concerning free-will) that the law of the conservation of energy 
governs physical phenomena and may, one day, be extended to all 
phenomena if psychological facts also prove favorable to it . . .we 
lay down the principle of the conservation of energy as a law which 
should govern all phenomena whatever. . . . Science, properly so- 
called, has therefore nothing to do with all this. We are simply 
confronted with a confusion between concrete duration and abstract 
time. . . . In a word, so-called physical determinism is reducible 
to psychological determinism . . . and it is this doctrine, as we 
hinted at first, that we have to examine" (p. 155). 

M. Bergson admits (p. 149) that there can be no freedom of any 
significance as long as the law of the conservation of energy is presup- 
posed unmitigated, but does little to mitigate its severity in the argu- 



18 LOGIC OF BERG SON'S PHILOSOPHY 

ment concentrated above, where the principle of the conservation of 
energy is ambiguously identified with "physical determinism," with 
the "universality of the principle of the conservation of energy," and 
with "a physical determinism spread over everything"; and where 
the subject-matter of the law of the conservation of energy is men- 
tioned as, first, "matter," then "things," "phenomena," "bodies," 
and at last "beings." An easy-going reader is apt to pass over 
the ambiguity of this argument because M. Bergson seeks to 
reduce the hypothesis of "physical determinism" to "psychological 
determinism," by two sets of considerations which, as they are 
arranged in his text, distract the attention of the reader from one 
another. 

Regarding the eleven topics, cited antecedently to the argument 
concerning the conservation of energy, on which we gave examples 
of M. Bergson's conflicting statements, it will be seen that a uniform 
principle of contradiction obtains: In the statements which we quote 
first under each topic M. Bergson affirms or implies either that quality 
and quantity, in general or in a particular aspect, are not mingled at 
all, or else that some proposition following from the fact of their 
separation is valid; — at this point of his various contentions the "con- 
fusion of quality and quantity" is treated as a false idea; a case of 
confused thinking, in the sense of the predication of an attribute of a 
subject from which it is absent. But this first attitude of mind is 
modified more and more as we follow the list of M. Bergson's state- 
ments under each topic, till at last we find M. Bergson affirming that 
quality and quantity are really mingled (or stating as true what con- 
sists with the fact of their mingling), and the "confusion of quality 
and quantity" has come to be looked on as an actual process of 
mixing or pouring together, due to one cause or another; to the inevit- 
able interaction of mind and matter in common experience, the influ- 
ence of language, the requirements of social life, or to something else. 

Perhaps instead of describing the argument of Time and Free-Will 
as a system of contradictions constructed around the propositions 
that the confusion of quality and quantity is a false predication and 
that it is an illegitimate fact, it would be more accurate to describe 
this argument as a mass of ambiguity in which two opposite tenden- 
cies of thought are manifest, — a tendency towards the assertion that, 
for theoretical reasons, quality and quantity can not be mingled with 
one another, and a tendency to acknowledge that their mingling is 
actual. The elaborate ambiguity of the argument of Time and Free- 
Will can be fully comprehended only by means of a patient study of 
the numerous details of its constitution, but we must give a few 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 19 

further indications in the subject before passing on to a general dis- 
cussion of the meaning of the peculiarity of the book. 

To illustrate the ambiguity anew we shall take the topic of psychic 
intensity. M. Bergson, we said, to return to the principles of our 
analysis, is convinced that the mind can not be quantitative. From 
this he concludes that there can not be any more-and-less of quality 
manifested in mental alteration. But what passes for mental change 
in intensity: the progress, for example, of moods from higher to 
lower degrees of exhilaration or sadness, or the appreciation of a 
progressive increase or abatement in temperatures or pains, is so 
obviously a quantitative alteration, that the only method by which 
it is possible to reconcile the observable character of change in the 
immediate with the supposition that there can be no psychical magni- 
tude, is directly or indirectly to subsume that part of change in the 
immediate which makes it describable as intensively quantitative, 
under the material division of the world, and no longer under the 
heading of mind. Yet to go the full length of this re-classification 
explicitly would be to give up the dualistic premise of the argument, 
according to which the immediate is mind, and matter and mind are 
separate. Consequently the status of the material of M. Bergson's 
contention concerning intensity is ambiguous. The quantitative part 
of the intensity may be treated as mental or as material, or as really 
mental and illegitimately material, or as really material and illegiti- 
mately mental, and so forth. In short, the subject-matter of M. 
Bergson's argument wavers back and forth across the line of division, 
in dualism, between mind and matter. 

If we search Chapter I of Time and Free-Will for an answer to 
the query: Does the mind exhibit intensive magnitude? we find the 
following uncertain statements: That although psychologists "see 
no harm in" speaking of states of consciousness as intensive, what 
they say "involves an important problem" (p. i); the problem, 
namely, why intensity can be "assimilated" to magnitude (p. 2); 
for, M. Bergson says, common sense agrees with philosophers in 
"setting up" intensity as a magnitude (p. 3); although, for instance, 
"the distinct phases in the progress of an esthetic feeling . . . 
correspond less to variations of degree than to difference of state 
or nature" (p. 17). "Though the intensity of . . . sensation can 
not be defined by the magnitude of its cause, there undoubtedly 
exists some relation between these two terms" (p. 20). "Science 
. . . tends to strengthen the illusion of common sense . . . that 
a purely psychic state . . . can . . . possess magnitude" (p. 21). 
"We maintain that the more a given effort seems to us to increase, the 



20 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

greater is the number of muscles which contract in sympathy with it, 
and that the apparent consciousness of a greater intensity of effort 

. . . is reducible ... to the perception of a larger surface of 
body . . . affected" (p. 24). "When you press your lips more 
and more tightly against one another, you believe that you are experi- 
encing . . . one . . . sensation which is . . . increasing. . . . 
Reflection will show you that this sensation remains identical, but 
that certain muscles of . . . the body have taken part in the opera- 
tion. You felt this . . . encroachment . . . which is . . .a 
change of quantity; but as your attention was concentrated on your 
closed lips, you localized the increase there and you made the psychic 
force there expended, into a magnitude, although it possessed no 
extensity" (p. 25). "I can picture ... a nerve transmitting a 
pain . . . and I can . . . understand that stronger or weaker 
stimulations influence this nerve differently. But I do not see how 
these differences of sensation would be interpreted by our conscious- 
ness as differences of quantity unless we connected them with . . . 
reactions that usually accompany them. . . . Without these . . . 
reactions, the intensity of the pain would be . . . quality, and not 

o . . magnitude" (p. 37). There is something "in common, from 
the point of view of magnitude, between a physical phenomenon and 
a state of consciousness . . . " (p. 34). "When it is said that an 
object occupies a large space in the soul . . . the reflective con- 
sciousness . . . will assume . . . that . . . such and such a 
desire has gone up a scale of magnitude, as though it were permissible 

. . . to speak of magnitude where there is neither multiplicity nor 
space" (p. 9). 

If, dissecting the ambiguity of these statements, we ask whether, 
according to M. Bergson, intensity is or is not a magnitude, we dis- 
cover that intensity, by implication, is a magnitude (p. 1) ; by implica- 
tion, it is not (p. 3). Further, M. Bergson writes that we "experience 

. . . an analogous impression" in the case of both intensity and 
extensity (or magnitude) (p. 3). "In the idea of intensity ... we 
find the image of . . . something virtually extended. . . . We 
are thus led to believe that we translate the intensive into the exten- 
sive . . . " (p. 4). Intensity of effort "seems to be presented imme- 
diately to consciousness under the form of quantity or at least of 
magnitude" (p. 20). A "crude conception of effort plays a large part 
in our belief in intensive magnitudes" (p. 21). "To sum up . . . 
we have found that the notion of intensity consists in a certain esti- 
mate of the magnitude of the cause by means of a certain quality in 
the effect; it is . . .an acquired perception, " or "we give the name 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 21 

of intensity to the larger or smaller number of simple psychic phe- 
nomena which we conjecture to be involved in the fundamental state: 
it is no longer an acquired perception, but a confused perception" 
(p. 72). In the next chapter M. Bergson remarks that ''pure dura- 
tion . . . must ... be reckoned among the so-called intensive 
magnitudes, if intensities can be called magnitudes (p. 106)." On 
pages 3, 5, 6, 7, 20, 25, 42, 43, 70, 185, 222, intensity is subjective and 
opposed to extensity ; on pages 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 60, 145, it is objective 
and identified, more or less, with extensity itself. 

Pursuing this ambiguity into the subject-matter of M. Bergson's 
discussion, in the plane of a more specific description, we note that the 
subjects to which M. Bergson ascribes the imperfectly localized 
attribute of intensity tend to lose their precise position in his dualistic 
theory. The discussion on page 5 might make one surmise that the 
author of Time and Free- Will considers that psychic states present 
an objective aspect, since he seems to mention the "subjective aspect" 
of "psychic states." Movements, though commonly supposed objec- 
tive and usually treated as such in the book we are studying, become 
more or less subjective at several points in its argument; we have 
"conscious movements" (p. 26); "organic disturbances" are alto- 
gether unconscious as movements (p. 32), but "future automatic 
movements" are "likely to be conscious as movements" (pp. 34, 35). 
Effort or muscular tension is at once subjective and objective in a 
vague way (pp. 9, 22, 29). Sensations are subjective by definition 
(p. 1) ; they are "peripheral" (p. 26) ; "peripheral sensations" "accom- 
pany psychic states" (p. 2y); "peripheral sensations are substituted 
for inner states" (p. 31); and furthermore we gather that there are 
sensations which do not occupy space, and others which do (p. 32). 
Finally, it is written that in attention "the feeling of a muscular 
contraction" is not "a purely psychic factor" (p. 28); and that in 
anger organic sensations are not the psychical element (p. 29). n 

In contending that so-called psychic magnitude — psychic intensity 
in particular — is spatial, M. Bergson becomes a pure experience 
philosopher, after a fashion, though when he describes the presence 
of space in the mind, or of the mind in space, it is as though the con- 
junction were illegitimate, or at least abnormal, and deserving to be 
discontinued completely, or — sometimes — eliminated from philosophy 
and psychology, with the concession that mind, so far as practical 
life and common sense are concerned, may be quantitative. This 
explains, within the supposition of our analysis, how M. Bergson comes 
to make a class of remarkable statements which we exemplify as 

11 Cf. pp. 7, 30, 39. 47. and passim. 



22 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

follows: " . . . if we hold a pin in our right hand and prick our 
left hand more and more . . . we . . . feel ... a tickling, then 
a touch ... a prick ... a pain localized at a point, and finally 
the spreading of this pain. . . . And the more we reflect . . . the 
more clearly we shall see that we are here dealing with so many 
qualitatively distinct sensations. . . . But . . . we spoke of one 
. . . sensation which spread ... of one prick which increased 
in intensity. The reason is that, without noticing it, we localized in 
the sensation of the left hand, which is pricked, the progressive effort 
of the right hand, which pricks. We thus introduced the cause into 
the effect, and unconsciously interpreted quality as quantity, inten- 
sity as magnitude" (p. 42). "The magnitude of a representative 
sensation depends on the cause having been put into the effect" (p. 47). 
"We confuse the feeling which is in a perpetual state of becoming, 
with its permanent external object, and especially with the word 
which expresses this object. In the same way as the fleeting duration 
of our ego is fixed by its projection in homogeneous space, our con- 
stantly changing impressions, wrapping themselves round the external 
object which is their cause, take on its definite outlines and its immo- 
bility" (p. 130). " . . .as external objects . . . are more impor- 
tant to us than subjective states ... we have everything to gain 
by objectifying these states, by introducing into them . . . the 
representation of their external cause. And the more our knowledge 
increases, the more we perceive the extensive behind the intensive, 
quantity behind quality, the more also we tend to thrust the former 
into the latter, and to treat our sensations as magnitudes. Physics, 
whose particular function it is to calculate the external cause of our 
internal states . . . deliberately confuses them with their cause. 
It thus encourages and even exaggerates the mistake which common 
sense makes on this point. The moment was . . . bound to come 
at which science, familiarized with this confusion between quality 
and quantity, between sensation and stimulus, should seek to measure 
the one as it measures the other. . . . For if we grant that one 
sensation can be stronger than another, and that this inequality is 
inherent in the sensations themselves, independently of all associa- 
tion of ideas, of all more or less conscious consideration of number 
and space, it is natural to ask by how much the first sensation exceeds 
the second, and to set up a quantitative relation between their inten- 
sities" (p. 70). 12 

M. Bergson's argument on intensity, then, is an elaboration of the 
two propositions that quality and quantity can not come into contact 

12 Cf. pp. 28, 30, 44, 47, 48, SO, 54, 70, 71. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 23 

with one another or be mingled together, and that they are mingled 
together by an encroachment of space on the realm of the psychic. 
The above citations are meant to mark out the principal developments 
of this original ambiguity, but — we reiterate — its complete figure 
can only be comprehended by a study of Chapter I of Time and 
Free-Will, page by page; for the modification of nouns that carry the 
suggestion of materiality by adjectives which are ordinarily thought 
of as referring to what is psychic, and vice versa; the description of the 
process of incursion as real with the reality of illusions, shadows, 
phantoms, and errors, and as being the result of an association of 
ideas in which ideas turn out to be the things, sometimes of immediate 
experience, sometimes the meanings of the mind, and sometimes, 
again, entities half way between meanings and mere existences, serve, 
along with a variety of other means, to sustain the fundamental 
ambiguity in M. Bergson's exposition in Chapter I of Time and 
Free-Will, as to the locus of intensity. 

Under the topic of intensity we thus find M. Bergson's ambiguity 
as to whether mind has magnitude, whether quality and quantity are 
confused actually, or only by the false predication of intensity and 
multiplicity and pure space of the psychic, branching out in a number 
of ways. A symmetrical development of the ambiguity in each of the 
dozen topics which were enumerated in illustration of the difficulty 
encountered by M. Bergson in his attempt to reconcile the theory that 
the immediate is pure quality with the observable nature of experi- 
ence, might be traced; but without further citations we proceed to 
consider the meaning of the contradictions which we have quoted in 
substantiation of our analysis. 

According to this analysis M. Bergson is ambiguous in specifying 
what features of immediate experience constitute mind, because, 
although he is forced to ascribe intensity and multiplicity to the mate- 
rial division of the world, he is prevented from re-defining intensity 
and multiplicity as material out and out, not only by the obvious 
character of immediate experience, but especially by the danger of 
converting his new form of dualism into an apparently arbitrary 
doctrine, which it would become if there were no illusion to be dis- 
pelled as to the nature of immediate experience; for it is precisely by 
showing that the immediate is spatial illegitimately that M. Bergson 
expects to point out the way to a philosophical reform, and to a valua- 
ble method in psychology. Indeed, if M. Bergson rejected intensity 
and multiplicity utterly from the immediate, the subject-matter of 
psychological investigation would become unrecognizable to common 
sense, incapable of definition, and incommensurable with language or 



24 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

any other systems of signs. This explains why M. Bergson is 
ambiguous as to the status in dualism of multiplicity and intensity, 
and why he takes advantage of dualism's ill-localized inextensive 
immediate to harbor the imperfectly identified mind of his novel 
psychology. 

But why should the combination of the fact of uniqueness with the 
dualistic hypothesis, which was the simplest form of our analysis of 
Time and Free-Will, grow into the contradictory propositions: that 
mind is pure quality — something not tangible enough to provide a 
subject-matter for psychological science; and that mind, contrary to 
the premises of dualism, is extended by the very possession of multi- 
plicity and intensity? 

The answer to this question can be made to emerge from a compari- 
son of the epistemological aspects of M. Bergson's original premises. 
In the first place, in so far as the theory of knowledge is concerned, 
dualism is primarily a device for palliating the difficulties of the 
resemblance theory of cognition. In this theory of knowledge an 
idea is true of its object by the resemblance it bears to that object; 
but since no resemblance short of absolute coincidence of attributes, 
or identity, appears to be perfect, absolute truth would seem to be 
found only where the idea is the same as the object. Following this 
train of thought further, it seems in addition that if an absolutely true 
idea coincides with its object, every object must be the absolutely 
true idea of itself. But in this case the possibility of error would be 
excluded, and in order to find some sort of lodging for error, object 
and idea would once more necessarily have to be distinguished and 
placed apart. The resemblance theory of knowledge, then, is threat- 
ened by the paradoxes that if idea and object are not different there 
can be no error; and, on the other hand, that as long as idea and object 
are different at all, genuine truth will appear precluded. Now, as was 
said, dualism, epistemologically speaking, is an arrangement for ward- 
ing off these complementary paradoxes. 

Dualism provides that idea and object shall absolutely resemble 
each other and yet be different, by means of the doctrine that mind 
corresponds to matter absolutely, though mind and matter remain 
distinct, since the one is unextended, the other extended. The most 
significant feature of dualism, then, from the point of view of the 
theory of knowledge, if our exposition is correct, is the doctrine of 
correspondence; and we noted at the commencement of this analysis 
how the fact of uniqueness, when combined with dualism, acted to 
modify the correspondence aspect of this theory. We must look for 
the source of M. Bergson's ambiguities and contradictions, conse- 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 2$ 

quently, in the relation of the doctrine of correspondence to the 
epistemological significance of the fact of uniqueness. 

The fact of uniqueness was described at the opening of our analysis 
as the fact that associationistic psychology is incompetent to describe 
the subject-matter of psychology accurately in terms of ideas or mental 
atoms or states of mind, since these terms are abstract whereas the 
world that surrounds and impresses us at any particular time is indi- 
vidual and unanalyzed into psychological elements. In other words, 
the fact of uniqueness is the fact that since science is abstract and its 
subject-matter concrete, a discrepancy inevitably exists between 
scientific knowledge and its object. The factual premise of M. Berg- 
son's fundamental logic was thus that a true idea is in some measure 
different from its object. But the fact that psychology proceeds by 
the method of abstractions meant to M. Bergson's mind not that the 
resemblance theory of knowledge is at fault, but that abstract 
psychology is not genuinely scientific. He reasoned that if psychology 
does not absolutely reproduce its subject-matter, psychology must 
be false, from the premise that true knowledge resembles its object. 
The fact, then, which M. Bergson set out to combine with the dualistic 
hypothesis, was that a true idea is different from its object; but 
this fact went along in his mind with the premise that an idea which 
is not identical with its object can not really be true. 

We have, then, the correspondence feature of dualism, which pre- 
serves in a kind of solution the contradictory notions that a true idea 
is absolutely like and yet different from its object, united painstak- 
ingly with the fact that true ideas are decidedly unlike their objects, 
and with the confident assumption that ideas are absolutely similar 
to objects of which they constitute true knowledge. M. Bergson's 
fact, as may be said, precipitates the ambiguity of the correspondence 
feature of dualism; it acts to diminish the correspondence aspect of 
the dualistic theory, and to lessen the theoretical resemblance of mind 
to matter. But as M. Bergson assumes that knowledge should be 
quite like its object, his development of the consequences of the view 
that mind must be dissimilar to matter is complicated and contra- 
dicted by the effects of his epistemological belief that they should be 
alike, and by the fact that their likeness is an empirical truth. In this 
way the contradictions and ambiguities illustrated under the dozen 
principal heads of our analysis are explained. 

The epistemological contradiction of the argument proceeds natu- 
rally into the propositions that immediate experience is the truth of 
itself; and that it is the falsehood or merely approximate truth of 
something else lying beyond or within. In the first case immediacy 



26 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

is supposed to be epistemologically sufficient to itself (p. 183), know- 
ing is seeing (pp. 197, 198) or acting (pp. 187, 220, 230), the very 
attempt to inquire or discuss the true nature of mind misleads (pp. 183, 
221), and language (p. 130) and conception (p. 236) are a source of 
illusions since they detach speculative curiosity from immediate con- 
tact with its subject-matter. This attitude in the theory of knowledge 
is not removed, by very much, from philosophical skepticism, since 
if each thing is the true idea of itself, truth as distinguished from error 
is in danger of vanishing. In the second case, where M. Bergson 
regards immediate experience as an approximation to something more 
true than itself, his estimate of the value of conception is reversed; 
psychological truth is to be got by inquiry, discussion, analysis, and 
abstraction; and language is not regarded as misleading generically. 12 
What M. Bergson thinks that he proves in Time and Free-Will is 
very different, in our opinion, consequently, from what he proves in 
reality. He thinks he proves that what passes for mind in science and 
common sense is, strictly speaking, not mind at all, since he believes 
that mental intensity and multiplicity result from an incursion of 
space into mind, and from a projection of mind into space. Mind 
comes to mean in his theory whatever immediate experience may be, 
minus not only extension, but intensity and multiplicity as well, and 
the empirical philosopher's pure experience, or immediate datum of 
consciousness, is elaborately explained in Time and Free-Will as an 
illegitimate pouring together, for unphilosophical reasons — for the 
sake of language, the saving of time, the requirements of life, the 
convenience of practise, or the habits of the intellect — of elements 
that should, by hypothesis, be apart. In so far, however, as M. 
Bergson tries to describe a process of confusion of mind and quantity, 
he gives up his dualistic premise; and his accounts of the mingling of 
quality and quantity, in terms of confusion, incursion, projection, 
assimilation, translation, exchange, imitation, osmosis, and so forth, 
are not evidence that dualism requires reformation, but evidence fatal 
to dualism itself. 

It has been shown that there are grave contradictions in M. Berg- 
son's exposition of all the capital topics treated in Time and Free-Will, 
and that these contradictions can be brought under the ambiguity of 
a theory regarding the relation of quantity to quality. Incidentally 
it has been shown that the interrelation of these contradictions points 
to their probable origin in an attempt to combine what we called the 
fact of uniqueness with the dualistic hypothesis, turning on a revision 

12 See Time and Free-Will, passim. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 27 

of the correspondence theory. Supposing such an attempt to have 
been the underlying principle of M. Bergson's work, not only the 
argument, but the extraordinary arrangement of the elements of the 
argument, the arbitrary nature of these elements, and even some of 
the literary characteristics of M. Bergson's text, are rendered explica- 
ble. Were we interested primarily in the argument of Time and Free- 
Will, as a whole, we should try to confirm our view that the doctrine 
of correspondence occupies a cardinal position therein, by showing the 
doctrine of parallelism, which is a ramification of the correspondence 
theory, to have engaged M. Bergson's mind prior and subsequent to 
the writing of Time and Free-Will, quoting relevant passages from his 
publications as follows 1 Extraits de Lucrece, Introduction ; Matter and 
Memory, Bulletin de la Societe Frangaise de Philosophie, Volumes 1 
and 5; Le Paralogism Psycho-Physiologique, Revue de Metaphysique 
et de Morale, Volume 12. Seeing, however, that our study of the 
argument of Time and Free-Will is for the sake of the light it sheds on 
M. Bergson's formulation and renunciation of a theory of mind, we 
shall proceed forthwith to the special question of M. Bergson's 
psychology. 

M. Bergson defines the principle of his psychology, in Time and 
Free-Will (Conclusion), as a reversal of the Kantian doctrine of per- 
ception, proposing the idea that inasmuch as the forms through which 
we know the material world are constantly employed by our minds, 
since the external world is vitally important to ourselves, we are likely, 
when we turn our attention inwards, to apprehend the soul in material 
terms. To perceive the soul — the object of psychology — as it is really, 
in his idea, consequently, we must subtract from our ordinary experi- 
ence of mind what it has in common with matter, and this demateriali- 
zation of ordinary experience will reveal the veritable nature of the 
soul to psychology. The principle of M. Bergson's doctrine, therefore, 
in his own terms, is that mind is not whatever matter may be. 

In the preceding analysis of Time and Free-Will we supposed M. 
Bergson to conclude from the fact of the interpenetration of elements 
in immediate experience, interpreted with the aid of the dualistic 
hypothesis, that matter and mind, rightly speaking, have nothing in 
common, and it will be well to mention why the results of a combina- 
tion of these premises can be expressed in terms of the Kantian phil- 
osophy. 

The epistemological upshot of M. Bergson's premises was an ambigu- 
ity containing the contrary views that immediate experience is true 
in its own right by itself, and that it is the falsehood of something 



28 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

else lying beyond which it hides. This ambiguity we traced to the 
premises themselves: The notion that absolute truth is the limiting 
case of increasing resemblance — that whatever is, is the truth of itself — 
and that object and idea differ permanently in order that error may 
find lodgment between the two terms we discovered suspended in 
solution in the doctrine of correspondence, and inhering separately, 
the one in M. Bergson's factual premise, the other in his assumption 
concerning the significance of that fact itself. Be it now noted that 
the same sort of ambiguity is embodied in the scheme of the Kantian 
philosophy. 

In this scheme to know is to apprehend a material by an act of the 
mind which makes its object knowable by knowing it. If we take this 
formula in one of its phases it seems as if, since what we know can only 
come to us through the forms of knowledge, we must know completely 
whatever is known at all, and as if, for this reason, we could never 
fall into error; it seems, in other words, as if the experience of which 
we become aware must have been perfectly shaped by the forms of 
the mind before or simultaneously with the event of our awareness, 
as if knowledge, that is, were the given structure of experience, and 
therefore as if the phenomenal world were impervious to error. To 
make room for error in his scheme Kant is forced to move experience 
downwards from its position above the laws of the mind towards the 
things-in- themselves ; in so far as experience moves in this direction 
in the Kantian scheme it loses its organization and shape and grows 
pervious to error. Thus the position of experience is indeterminate in 
Kant's philosophy for the same reason that dualism contends at once, 
by means of the correspondence theory, that matter and mind are 
absolutely similar to one another and different nevertheless. Hence 
there is no difficulty in explaining why M. Bergson can express his 
views in a vocabulary of Kantian ideas, although he may have reached 
his conclusions unaffected by direct preoccupation with the distinc- 
tions of the philosophy of Kant. In either case, whether M. Bergson 
was originally convinced that mind must be opposite in nature to 
matter because our habits of apprehending matter appeared to him 
likely, a priori, to vitiate the perception of inner experience ; or whether 
he came to this conviction because it inevitably grew out of the com- 
bination of the fact of uniqueness with the theory of dualism — the 
fact remains that, according to the fundamental principle of his psy- 
chology, mind must differ from matter in every respect. 

The premises out of which M. Bergson undertakes to develop a 
doctrine of mind are, therefore, simply that mind is a concrete unique 
interpenetration of elements (by observation), and that mind is the 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 29 

reverse of whatever matter may be (by deduction). Being the oppo- 
site of what matter is, it may be said at length that mind is without 
any magnitude — without intensity, without multiplicity, and without 
repetition, since if it manifested recurrent likenesses it would be quan- 
titative in two or more ways. Mind, therefore, can not grow or 
diminish, be multiple, exist in space or in time (conceived as a homo- 
geneity or dimension), nor can mind be caused in the sense of exhibit- 
ing regular sequences. Finally mind can not be described by means 
of abstractions nor depicted in words. Now what can M. Bergson do 
with this knowledge concerning the mind? 

Obviously, it will enable him to assail with effect the traditional 
teachings of psychology; to dispose of psychophysics, associationism, 
and determinism, since in part these doctrines stand on the theoretical 
foundation of his own deduction ; and to disprove several other much- 
cherished doctrines besides; but the more he urges his attack against 
the traditional psychology the clearer it must become that his own 
novel psychology is not a scientific doctrine at all, since it admits, in 
its logical form, that mind is ineffable and the attempt to explain the 
nature of mind not only foredoomed to failure, but positively perni- 
cious. At this pass M. Bergson's novel psychology becomes a regimen 
of life, a rule of freedom, and a prescription for looking at the imme- 
diate in a particular way in order thoroughly to see the interpenetra- 
tion of elements there, with which he set out; not the interpenetration, 
it is true, as a confluence precisely, for M. Bergson's deduction cur- 
tails most seriously the primary fact that gave it a start, and he is 
forced by his logic to affirm that the real immediate is not that simple 
interpenetration of which, for example, we have a description in 
William James's Stream of Thought, but an interpenetration of ele- 
ments that are not distinct, in a medium that is not continuous. From 
the fact that the deduction infringes his original observation we shall 
now go on to note why M. Bergson relinquishes his psychology. 

He relinquishes his psychology, in the first place, because he has 
made the principle of his doctrine the assumption that science must 
reproduce whatever there is in its subject-matter, and — since abstract 
terms are necessarily discrepant from what is concrete — he assumed in 
this way that the very abstractness of science is unscientific. But 
without some use of abstraction M. Bergson would be unable to make 
his ideas explicit; unable, perhaps, to have any ideas in the sense of 
meanings, and mind in the literal significance of his novel psychology 
could be neither generalized nor described. He abdicates his psychol- 
ogy, in the second place, because from his deduction he acquires a 
definition telling merely what mind is not; and for the purpose of 



30 LOGIC OF BERG SONS PHILOSOPHY 

constructing a positive doctrine it is necessary to alter this negative 
proposition concerning the mind into propositions with a tangible 
content. He is assured deductively that mind is not intensive and 
not multiple, but in disproving the intensity and multiplicity of mind 
his demonstration becomes a contention that since mind is not inten- 
sive it is discontinuous, and since it is not multiple it must be continu- 
ous in its change. 

We have here the reasons for M. Bergson's abdication of his novel 
theory that mind is really mere quality or pure heterogeneity. This 
abdication results in a number of what may be called longitudinal 
contradictions, since M. Bergson is required to modulate each one of 
his contentions: that mind is non-intensive, non-multiple, non-divisi- 
ble, temporally non-dimensional, and so forth — into its opposite; as 
has been shown in the preliminary analysis, the relevance of each one 
of the topics of contradiction illustrated above thus being direct in 
the matter of our special concern in this dissertation. The abdication 
results in, and can be demonstrated by, as well, a further series of 
contradictions which may be described as transverse; for not only does 
each line of M. Bergson's argument conflict with itself, but the several 
lines conflict with each other — since in permitting his negative proposi- 
tions concerning the mind to take on their colloquial or conveniently 
opposite positive significance, M. Bergson comes to maintain at once 
that mind is continuous and discontinuous, and its alteration discon- 
tinuous and continuous. 

It seems improbable that the underlying argument of Time and 
Free-Will has been manifest to a great many of its readers, since 
M. Bergson is almost universally regarded as an unequivocal champion 
of the continuity of immediate experience, though the argument of 
the first chapter of his earliest book is meaningless in itself and in 
relation to the following chapters, except as an attempt to demon- 
strate that states of consciousness can not increase or diminish con- 
tinuously. The contention to this effect is, moreover, clearly made in 
many passages. " . . . although," says M. Bergson (p. 57), in 
discussing the growing intensity of a luminous source, "the extensive 
cause varies continuously, the changes in the sensation of color are 
discontinuous." " . . . the successive shades of gray produced 
by a continuous decrease of illumination are discontinuous, as being 
qualities" (p. 58). " . . . sensation varies by sudden jumps while 
the stimulus increases continuously (p. 64)." "Assume that I experi- 
ence a sensation S, and that, increasing the stimulus continuously, I 
perceive this increase after a certain time ... I am now notified 
of the increase of the cause; but why call this notification an arith- 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 31 

metical difference? . . .It could only be called an arithmetical 
difference if I were conscious . . . of an interval between S and S' 
. . . By giving this transition a name . . . you make it ... . 
a reality and ... a quantity . . . Now you are not only unable to 
explain in what sense this transition is a quantity, but reflection will 
show you that it is not even a reality ; the only realities are the states 
S and S' . . ." (p. 65). 13 " . . . the decreasing intensities of 
white light illuminating a given surface would appear to an unpreju- 
diced consciousness as so many different shades, not unlike the vari- 
ous colors of the spectrum " (p. 54). " Ce qui le prouve bien, c'est que 
le changement n'est pas continu dans la sensation comme dans sa 
cause exterieure. . . . " (p. 40 of the French text.) 

The termination of the last quotation is given in French because 
in translation the sense of the original has been reversed. This takes 
us to the subject of the disparities between the English and French 
editions of Time and Free-Will, which illuminate to a considerable 
degree the matter we are discussing. 14 

The doctrine of Time and Free-Will has been viewed throughout 
the course of our preliminary analysis as a complicated deduction 
unfolding into the contentions, among a number of others, that imme- 
diate experience is really continuous and discontinuous. At first, it 
appears, M. Bergson was inclined to lay more emphasis on the former 
of these contradictory contentions, and this inclination was, as it 
seems, strengthened in the progress of his later writings not only by 
the attempt to avoid contradiction, which would have encouraged 
increasingly whichever inclination had first been preferred, but by 
other influences within and without the field of M. Bergson's own 
speculation. Without this field, but acting upon it, was the influence 
of William James's chapter in The Principles of Psychology on "The 
Stream of Thought"; and the fact that William James — under whose 
auspices the philosophy of M. Bergson first grew familiar to many 
readers of English — was interested largely in the phase of that phi- 
losophy which assisted the vindication of the continuity of immediate 
experience. The English-reading public has possibly overestimated 
M. Bergson's interest in the contention that immediate experience is 
continuous, being far more than M. Bergson taken with the idea that 
if the immediate is not made up of discrete parts, no "trans-empirical 

18 Cf. especially pp. 68, 69. 

14 The disparities between Les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience and Time and Free-Will are so 

marked in a good many passages that we suppose they must exhibit the effect of M. Bergson's revision. 

The translator writes in his Preface to Time and Free-Will. "In making the following translation of 

. . . (the) Essai sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience I have had the great advantage of 

. . . (M. Bergson's) cooperation at every stage . . . " 



32 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

connective tissue" will be required to join these parts to each other. 
At any rate, the view that the mind is ineffable and continuous and 
discontinuous — with which, on the only supposition that renders the 
arguments of Time and Free-Will comprehensible, M. Bergson, as we 
believe, proceeded — is more clearly presented in Les Donnees Imme- 
diates de la Conscience than in the English version of that work, and 
the disparities between the original and translation, which are too 
numerous to have been the effect of an accident, fall in harmoniously 
with the explanations advanced in this dissertation concerning the 
significance of M. Bergson's epistemology. 

For example, in Les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience (p. 80) 
M. Bergson describes pure duration, which is the same as pure mind 
or the unvitiated datum of immediate consciousness, as an 
indistincte multiplicity with no relation to number ; in Time and Free- 
will (p. 105) the word corresponding to "indistincte" is " continuous, " 
which converts the negative term into a term of positive significance. 
Here the English version, more than the French, departs from the 
original contention, arising from M. Bergson's premises, that mind is 
neither continuous nor discontinuous. Later in the French edition (p. 91) 
pure duration is again defined to be "heterogene" and "indistincte"; 
but the corresponding definition in English (p. 120) is " heterogene- 
ous" and "continuous"; and again, in English (p. 238, note), the word 
" continuous" is used to translate "indistincte," modifying "duree" 
(French, p. 183, note). Similarly, since — in so far as M. Bergson 
departs from the fundamental logic of his position he conceives of 
the "confusion" of quality with quantity as being a real process of 
incursion or osmosis or whatever, and of the falsity of the confusion 
as being an illegitimate association of ideas in which the ideas are 
mere existences more than meanings — we find that whereas M. Berg- 
son, in French (p. 55), originally spoke of this confusion as corrupting 
our "representation" of change; in English (p. 74) it is our "feeling" 
of change which he describes as corrupted. In the same manner the 
real self is said to be reached by "une reflexion approfondie" in Les 
Donnees Immediates de la Conscience (p. 178); but in the English 
translation (p. 231) by a "deep introspection"; and past states of the 
mind which "represent" phases of our real duration in French (pp. 183- 
184), "are" these phases in English (p. 239) ! 15 

To sum up: M. Bergson attempts to establish an anti-material 
psychology by defining the mind as non-quantitative, non-repetitious, 

"For other alterations explicable analogously see Time and Free-Will, pp. xix, 6, 12, 26, 77.87, 93, 
ior, 128, 139, 142, 164, 167, 183. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 33 

and undetermined. But in adhering to the terms of this definition he 
finds that his anti-material mind is not amenable to investigation by 
means of abstractions nor commensurable with words — that his psy- 
chology is a method of intuition or behavior; not a doctrine that can 
be formulated or communicated; not a natural science. From this 
skeptical position M. Bergson recedes by dividing the contention that 
mind is non-quantitative into the contentions that mind is non- 
multiple and non-intensive, altering these separately into the con- 
tentions that mind is continuous and discontinuous, and palliating 
the contradiction as best he is able. He alters the contention that 
mind is non-repetitious into the statements that it is heterogeneous 
in its depths or on critical occasions. The contention that it is unde- 
termined is modified into the view that mind is probably or possibly 
uncaused, or uncaused in a certain sense, aspect, or manner. 

From this attempt to formulate a science by adding to descriptions 
of immediate experience abstract statements as to what a true science 
of immediate experience can not be, altered by roundabout methods 
into contradictory propositions as to what the real immediate must 
be, M. Bergson emerges with his epistemological convictions unmodi- 
fied. We have next to observe the repetition in Matter and Memory 
of this attempt to formulate a science in terms of epistemological 
objections to the attributes which natural science is actually found to 
possess. 



II 

(i) MATTER AND MEMORY 

The chiefly significant difference between the arrangement of M. 
Bergson's assumptions and observations in Time and Free-Will and 
Matter and Memory is that he accepts the extension of immediate 
experience as a genuine philosophical fact in the latter work, whereas 
in Time and Free-Will space is supposed to be present in the imme- 
diate illegitimately. M. Bergson's recognition that the immediate is 
really extended was encouraged, perhaps, by an advance in psycho- 
logical doctrine in various quarters, but the development of the 
doctrine itself of Time and Free-Will from the premise that the imme- 
diate data of consciousness are unextended, to the demonstration that 
practise and language and abstract thought involve the confusion of 
quantity and quality in the sense of an actual mingling or pouring 
together of matter and mind, brought M. Bergson close to the complete 
admission that the immediate is extended. Postulating the extension 
of immediate experience, but retaining the dualistic hypothesis and 
the theory that genuine knowledge must coincide with the object of 
knowledge, M. Bergson proceeds to develop a doctrine epistemo- 
logically similar to the doctrine of Time and Free-Will. The principal 
peculiarity of that book lay in its attempt to combine the fact that a 
discrepancy separates the terms of the science of psychology from psy- 
chology's subject-matter, with the theory that knowledge is true of its 
object in the measure of their resemblance. Now in granting the exten- 
sion of immediate experience M. Bergson accepts the presence of 
matter in immediate consciousness and confronts a discrepancy sepa- 
rating the terms of conceptual physics from the immediate material 
of physical science, parallel to the discrepancy between the terms and 
subject-matter of psychological science. Hence, in Matter and Memory 
M. Bergson attempts a reform of the science of matter similar to the 
reform he attempted in Time and Free-Will of the science of mind. 

Due to his epistemological presupposition M. Bergson tended to 
identify knowledge of mind with the subject-matter of psychological 
science, but the tendency was checked by the danger of excluding the 
possibility of error from psychology. Hence the ''genuine" mind of 
Time and Free-Will was sometimes concrete experience and sometimes 
an abstraction therefrom, according to the circumstances of M. 
Bergson's treatment. Similarly in Matter and Memory M. Bergson 

34 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 35 

attempts to identify "genuine" matter with immediate experience, 
and then, reversing this tendency, grants that matter is an abstraction 
really, just as the physical scientists claim that it is. But in addition 
to an indeterminate doctrine of physics in which real matter is denned 
alternately as the abstraction that physics describes and as a concrete 
immediate experience, Matter and Memory once more presents an 
indeterminate psychology in which genuine mind approaches and 
recedes from immediate experience. Hence two general statements 
in Matter and Memory concerning experience: Allowing both matter 
and mind to coincide with the immediate data of consciousness, and 
consequently with one another, M. Bergson treats all reality as of a 
piece, thereby satisfying his premise that veritable knowledge is one 
with its object. But the necessity of providing a position for error 
bars him from the hypothesis that reality is all of a piece, and causes 
M. Bergson to distinguish matter and mind from one another by dis- 
tinguishing both from immediate experience. 

The former descriptive treatment of the make-up or character of 
reality is exemplified in Matter and Memory in numerous passages. 
Thus in setting forth the results to which the application of his method 
of trusting (p. 245) to "immediate knowledge" may lead, M. Bergson 
formulates a number of propositions (pp. 246-291) which are intended, 
according to himself (p. 267), to narrow the interval between hetero- 
geneous qualities and homogeneous movements, or sensations and 
matter. And in this phase of his thought he describes matter and mind 
as different rhythms of duration, or different degrees of tension of 
consciousness in a scale of being (p. 275). For the most part M. Berg- 
son, however, breaks reality into separate terms: mind, matter, and 
immediate experience. In outline the indetermination of the nature 
he ascribes to matter and mind develops the following variations. 

When, in order to satisfy his epistemological premise, M. Bergson 
begins to reduce the interval between immediate experience and matter 
by treating the abstractness of conceptual matter as false, the "pure 
perception" in which M. Bergson supposes mind and matter partly to 
coincide, tends to take on the character of conceptual matter. As the 
interval disappears and matter becomes immediate experience, quality 
is treated as actually present in matter; matter acquires the charac- 
teristics which physical science disregards in immediate experience; 
matter is no longer a determined system of movements, but exercises 
the faculty of choice; and "pure perception" is concrete immediate 
experience. And so, as matter moves towards immediate experience, 
" pure perception" is identified with ordinary perception; that is, mem- 
ory is treated as the mark of whatever is mental, and as constituting 



36 LOGIC of bergson's philosophy 

perception, and even matter, perhaps. But, contrarily, when matter 
regresses from immediate experience in the direction of conceptual 
space, memory is treated as falsifying perception. Now, when matter 
coincides with the immediate data of consciousness, ceasing to be a 
determined system of movements, the nerves choose and deliberate 
and do the work of the mind; and mind, or the past, influences matter 
directly by affecting the brain. Naturally, when matter falls in with 
immediate experience, the abstract space of mathematical physics is 
described as an instrument of falsification vitiating concrete extensity. 
But when the identification of mind with the immediate forces 
matter towards conceptual matter, space is treated as valid phi- 
losophically. 

In his Introduction to Matter and Memory M. Bergson states 
his project of reforming philosophy by identifying matter with imme- 
diate experience. The difficulties of dualism are due for the most 
part, he declares (p. vii), to the conceptions which philosophers enter- 
tain of matter; Descartes, he continues (p. ix), put matter too far from 
us when he made it one with geometrical space, and Berkeley exceeded 
the truth in an opposite direction when he made matter coincide with 
mind. "We place ourselves," says M. Bergson, "at the point of view 
of a mind unaware of the disputes between philosophers. Such a mind 
would naturally believe that matter exists just as it is perceived. . . . 
In a word, we consider matter before the dissociation which idealism 
and realism have brought about between its existence and its appear- 
ance (p. viii)." The difficulty, as we have said, connected with the 
enterprise of identifying matter and immediate experience, appears in 
a loss of the distinction between the object of physical science and 
that science itself, involving the preclusion of error in physics. In 
accordance with our preliminary outline above let us record some of 
the ambiguities springing from the difficulty of identifying matter 
with immediate experience. 

We start from perception and note that as matter recedes from the 
immediate, perception is dragged in the direction of space. Sometimes 
in M. Bergson's exposition matter is qualitative; that is, it partakes 
of the nature of immediate experience : " . . . the sensible qualities 
of matter would be known in themselves . . . could we but dis- 
engage them from that particular rhythm of duration which character- 
izes our consciousness" (p. 75). " . . .we must leave to matter 
those qualities which materialists and spiritualists alike strip from 
it" (p. 180). " . . . there is no impassible barrier, no essential 
difference, no real distinction even . . . between quality and move- 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 37 

ment" (p. 291). l At other points in his exposition M. Bergson seems 
to argue that matter is not legitimately possessed of its perceived qual- 
ities: "The qualitative heterogeneity of our . . . perceptions of 
the universe results from the fact that . . . memory condenses in 
each an enormous multiplicity of vibrations. . . . If we were to 
eliminate all memory, we 4 should pass . . . from perception to 
matter . . . Then matter . . . would tend more and more 
towards that system of homogeneous vibrations of which realism tells 
us . . ." (p. 76). Concomitantly perception recedes from mind: 
"Pure perception . . . however rapid we suppose it to be, occupies 
a certain depth of duration, so that our successive perceptions are 
never the real moments of things . . . " (p. 75) " . . . spirit" 
is "in perception already memory . . . " " . . . the humblest 
function of spirit is to bind together the successive moments of the 
duration of things . . ." (p. 295). Yet: "... pure perception 
is . . . in a sense matter . . ." (p. 325). Further: " . . . 
matter . . . coincides, in essentials, with pure perception . . ." 
"It is in very truth within matter that pure perception places us 
. . ." (p. 235). "These . . . terms, perception and matter, 
approach each other in the measure that we divest ourselves of . . . 
the prejudices of action . . ." (p. 293). 2 

Does memory then falsify or does it constitute perception? As 
matter progresses in the direction of the immediate, forcing percep- 
tion towards mind, memory seems to be essential to perception, 
perhaps even to matter itself: "Does not ... an irreducible opposi- 
tion remain between matter . . . and the lowest degree of . . . 
memory? . . . the distinction subsists, but union becomes pos- 
sible, since it would be, given, under the radical form of a partial 
coincidence, in pure perception. . . . We may go further: memory 
does not intervene as a function of which matter has no presenti- 
ment and which it does not imitate in its own way" (p. 297). But: 
" . . . what can be a non-perceived material object . . . unless 
it is a kind of unconscious mental state" (p. 183)? " . . . matter 
as grasped in concrete perception . . . is in great part the work 
of memory" (p. 237). "Theoretically . . . the part played by 
consciousness in external perception . . . [is] to join together, by 
the continuous- thread of memory, instantaneous visions of the real. 
But, in fact, there is for us nothing that is instantaneous. In all 
that goes by that name there is already some work of memory" 
(P- 75)- "Your perception, however instantaneous, consists . . . 

1 Cf. pp. 75. 183. 237, 238, 244, 268, 271, 276, 293. 
2 C/. pp. 78, 183,306. 



38 LOGIC of bergson's philosophy 

in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth 
every perception is already memory" (p. 194). " . . .to perceive 
consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted exis- 
tence" (p. 275). Slightly different is the following view of the subject: 
" . . . the subjective side of perception . . . [is] the contraction 
effected by memory, and the objective reality of matter . . . [is] 
the multitudinous and successive vibrations into which this percep- 
tion can be internally broken up" (p. 77). As matter approaches 
homogeneous space, memory is treated more and more like a foreign 
element in perception. M. Bergson argues (pp. 24, 25) that perception 
must not be supposed to differ from memory in degree of intensity 
only; that in order to make our idea of matter clear we must neglect 
the contraction operated by memory ; and that perception as confined 
to the present, over against perception impregnated with the past, 
would mould itself truthfully on its object. "Our perception of 
matter is . . . [not] relative or subjective, at least in principle, and 
apart from memory" (p. 48). "The capital error, the error which, 
passing over from psychology into metaphysic, shuts us out . 
from the knowledge ... of body and of spirit, is that which sees 
only a difference of intensity, instead of a difference of nature, between 
pure perception and memory" (p. 71). " . . . memory above all 
. . . lends to perception its subjective character; the philosophy of 
matter must aim in the first instance ... at eliminating the con- 
tributions of memory" (p. 80). "Either. . . our conception of mat- 
ter is false, or memory is radically distinct from perception" (p. 318). 3 
Similarly, as matter progresses in the direction of the immediate 
it ceases to be the system of determined interactions defined by physics, 
and takes on indetermination in the form of a faculty of choice. 
11 . . . matter, the further we push its analysis . . . [tends] more 
and more to be only a succession of . . . movements which may 
be deduced each from the other . . ." (p. 295). "To reply to an 
action received by an immediate reaction . . . this is the funda- 
mental law of matter: herein consists necessity" (p. 279). " . , . 
we may say that the nervous system, a material mass presenting . 
physical properties only . . . can have no other office than to 
receive, inhibit, or transmit movement" (p. 78). " . . . the living 
body in general, and the nervous system in particular, are the only 
channels for the transmission of movements . . ." (p. 81). " . . . 
as soon as we compare the structure of the spinal cord with that of the 
brain, we are bound to infer that there is merely a difference of compli- 
cation, and not a difference in kind, between the functions of the 

3 Cf. pp. 45, 64, 72, 75. 78, 84.315. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 39 

brain and the . . . activity of the medullary system" (p. 18). 
Nevertheless: " . . . there is . . .a radical distinction between 
the pure automatism, of which the seat is mainly in the spinal cord, 
and the voluntary activity which requires the intervention of the 
brain" (p. 18). " . . . the cells of the various regions of the 
cortex . . . allow the stimulation received to reach at will this or 
that motor mechanism of the spinal cord, and so to choose its effect" 
(p. 19). " . . .if there exist in the material world places where 
the vibrations received are not mechanically transmitted . 
[these] zones of indetermination . . . must occur along the path 
of what is termed the sensori-motor process" (p. 37). "The afferent 
nerves bring to the brain a disturbance, which, after having intelli- 
gently chosen its path, transmits itself to motor mechanisms created 
by repetition" (p. 96). 4 

In the measure that matter moves from pure space towards imme- 
diate experience, acquiring the character of concrete perception, which 
is constituted by memory, the past, from being invalid takes on a 
clearly admitted potency: " . . . though the whole series of our 
past images remains present with us, still the representation which is 
analogous to the present perception has to be chosen" (p. 114). "In 
the degree that . . . recollections take the form of a more complete, 
more concrete, and more conscious representation, do they tend to 
confound themselves with the perception which attracts them . . ." 
(p. 160). "Virtual, this memory can only become actual by means 
of the perception which attracts it. Powerless, it borrows life and 
strength from the present sensation in which it is materialized" (p. 
163). " . . . the past tends to reconquer, by actualizing itself, 
the influence it had lost" (p. 169). "It is just because I made . . . 
[pure memory] active that it has become actual, that is to say, a 
sensation capable of provoking movements" (p. 179). "Memory 
. [is] powerless as long as it remains without utility . . ." 
(p. 181). Injure the cerebral mechanism and " . . . you deprive 
. . . [the past image] of all means of acting upon the real and 
consequently ... of being realized" (p. 88). " . . . our mem- 
ory directs upon the perception . . . the memory-images which 
resemble it . . . Memory thus creates anew the present perception" 
(p. 123). "We will try to follow pure memory ... in the con- 
tinuous effort which it makes to insert itself into motor habit" (p. 202). 
" . . . it is necessary that . . . recollections . . . should be 
able to set going in the brain the same machinery that perception 
ordinarily sets to work" (p. 316). 5 

*Cf. pp. 2, s, 10, 20, 21, 30, 32, 35, 40, 46, 68, 80, 86. 178, 299, 309, 331. 
5 C/. pp. 87, 97, 98, 103, 119. 131. 168, 176, 180, 185, 197, 299. 319. 320. 



40 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

In so far as the past is viewed by M. Bergson as endowed with 
potency the distinction of function between the spinal cord and the 
brain becomes more marked; since it is upon the brain that he con- 
siders the past to act: "There is . . . only a difference of degree 
— there can be no. difference in kind — between what is called the per- 
ceptive faculty of the brain and the reflex functions of the spinal cord" 
(p. 10). "In our opinion (p. 19) . . . the brain is no more than a 
kind of central telephonic exchange . . .its office is limited to the 
transmission and division of movement" (p. 20). "The truth is that 
my nervous system interposed between the objects which affect my 
body and those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting, 
sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is composed 
of an enormous number of threads which stretch from the periphery 
to the center, and from the center to the periphery" (p. 40). On the 
other hand: "Our contention ... is that . . . there are . . . 
in . . . [the substance of the brain], organs of virtual perception, 
influenced by the intention of memory, as there are at the periphery 
organs of real perception, influenced by the action of the object" (p. 
164, note). The " . . . organ of sense ... is like an immense 
keyboard, on which the external object executes at once its harmony 
of a thousand notes. . . . Now, suppress the external object or the 
organ of sense, or both : the same elementary sensations may be excited, 
for the same strings are there, ready to vibrate in the same way; but 
where is the keyboard which permits thousands of them to be struck 
at once? ... In our opinion the 'region of images,' if it exists, 
can only be a keyboard of this nature. Certainly it is in no way 
inconceivable that a purely psychic cause should directly set in action 
all the strings concerned" (p. 165). " . . .in the case of mental 
hearing . . . [there is] only one plausible hypothesis . . . namely 
that . . . [the temporal lobe] occupies with regard to the center of 
hearing itself the place that is exactly symmetrical with the organ of 
sense. It is, in this case, a mental ear." 6 

As matter moves from space to immediate experience, the concept of 
homogeneous space, by means of which physics abstracts matter 
from the immediate, is treated as an illegitimate substitute for concrete 
extensity. When M. Bergson regards the science of physics as specu- 
latively true, saying for example that " . . . the object of science is 
. . . to rediscover the natural articulations of a universe we have 
carved artificially" (p. 260), and that Faraday and Kelvin (p. 265) are 
the two physicists of the nineteenth century who have penetrated far- 
thest into the constitution of matter, he certainly accepts as specu- 

8 Cf., pp. 86, 167, 168, 299. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 41 

latively valid the concept of geometrical space. And when M. Bergson 
criticizes the notion of homogeneous time (p. 273), he seems to regard 
space as a legitimate philosophical concept. But later on (p. 276), 
space is mentioned as merely "underlying" phenomena, and as not 
being (p. 280) a "property of things," but a " wholly ideal diagram 
(p. 278) of arbitrary and infinite divisibility," which, for the sake of 
action, "we throw . . . beneath concrete extensity" in order to 
"persuade ourselves that the real is divisible at will." Space, he writes, 
is "the diagrammatic design of our eventual action upon matter" (p. 
280) ; and is neither (p. 281) a reality contemplated nor a form of con- 
templation, from the speculative point of view. "The artifice of the 
philosophical method proposed," says M. Bergson (p. 243), "consists 
. in distinguishing the point of view of customary or useful 
knowledge from that of true knowledge." The question whether such 
a method is applicable to the problem of matter (p. 244), is the question 
whether "in this 'diversity of phenomena' of which Kant spoke, that 
part which shows a vague tendency towards extension could be 
seized by us on the hither side of the homogeneous space to which it is 
applied and through which we subdivide it . . ." "Certainly it would 
be a chimerical enterprise to try to free ourselves from the fundamental 
conditions of external perception. But the question is whether certain 
conditions, which we usually regard as fundamental, do not rather 
concern the use to be made of things . . . far more than the pure 
knowledge which we can have of them. ... In regard to con- 
crete extension . . .we do not see why it should be bound up with 
the amorphous and inert space which subtends it. . . . It might, 
then, be possible, in a certain measure, to transcend space without 
stepping out of extensity, and here we should really have a return to 
the immediate, since we do indeed perceive extensity, whereas space is 
merely conceived — being a kind of mental diagram" (p. 45). 

Just as in Time and Free-Will the material of M. Bergson's argument 
wavered back and forth between space and pure uniqueness, so here 
his material moves between space and ' ' pure perception , ' ' and between 
"pure perception" and "pure memory." He has spaced out his original 
scheme of two points : quality and quantity, with a third term in which 
they legitimately meet. And the difficulty experienced by M. Bergson 
in satisfying the implication of the resemblance-theory of knowl- 
edge: that each object is the only genuine knowledge of itself, which 
made it difficult for him to secure the separateness of qualitative mind 
from quantitative matter, recurs now in the difficulty of preventing 
matter from coinciding with pure perception. Symmetrically, to 



42 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

provide for error (and to provide for the possibility of abstraction, 
and for the undeniable validity of physical science), it is impossible 
for M. Bergson fully to identify matter with pure experience; it is 
impossible for him to be faithful entirely to his intention of considering 
matter "before the dissociation which idealism and realism have 
brought about between its existence and its appearance," just as it 
was impossible for him to admit the confusion of matter with mind, in 
Time and Free-Will, as a legitimate fact. In order better to envisage 
the relation between the distribution of M. Bergson's epistemological 
elements in Time and Free-Will, and their distribution in Matter and 
Memory, we must compare his opinions as to the sources of the corrup- 
tion of immediate experience as they are set forth in the one book and 
in the other. 

In Time and Free-Will M. Bergson concluded, — after discovering 
an' element of experience different from the matter of physics and 
from what the mind of associationistic psychology has in common 
with the matter of physics, — that real mind or the real immediate is the 
opposite of the abstract matter of physical science. He concluded 
that what was originally real mind has become falsified by*being mate- 
rialized through the influence of language, stupidity, social life, or what 
not. In Matter and Memory, having admitted to his philosophy a new 
term in which matter and mind are supposed coincident, he is able no 
longer unequivocally to claim that matter falsifies the immediate, 
since he has brought matter into the immediate, and the immediate 
could not readily be imagined to falsify itself. He is therefore forced, 
in so far as he makes pure perception a fraction of the material world, 
to suppose matter falsified by mind ; for he must suppose the immediate 
falsified because he finds in it an element — uniqueness — not repre- 
sented in physics, where it should be represented, in his view, in order 
to satisfy the implication of the resemblance-theory that an idea must 
be one with its object to be genuinely true. But, when he regards 
the immediate as especially mental he is forced to find in matter 
an influence reaching out to falsify mind. In order that matter may 
falsify the immediate it must be distinct therefrom, and thus must 
take on the abstract character ascribed to it ordinarily by physics. By 
legitimatizing the extension of the immediate, in other words, M. 
Bergson breaks down the principal distinction between mind and 
matter, and over against the concrete unique phases of immediate 
experience he can set not only abstract matter, but abstract mind as 
well, attributing the abstractness of the sciences of the immediate to 
the illegitimate influence of first one side of the dualistic world and 
then of the other. 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 43 

Real matter, therefore, will be defined by the absence of certain 
attributes treated as veritably present in mind and thence illegiti- 
mately transferred to the material world. Real mind will be defined 
by the absence of these same attributes now supposed veritably proper 
to the nature of matter and introduced illegitimately to the realm of 
consciousness. The reconciliation of these contradictory views will be 
achieved by giving up the dualistic distinction and treating all reality 
as concrete and unique in a variety of ways, and as lacking in all of 
these forms the characteristics that distinguish the terms of abstract 
science from immediate experience. 

What, then, are the causes, according to M. Bergson, that have led 
philosophy to mistake the real nature of matter? Sometimes the cor- 
ruption of matter and of experience in general is ascribed to causes 
determined vaguely, as for instance: to "the need of symmetry" (p. 
250), ''the exigencies of social life" (p. 239), an "invincible tendency" 
(p. 154), "instinct" (p. 186), "reflexion" (p. 216), a "metaphysical 
error" (p. 45), "life" (p. 194), "language" (p. 159), " scientific thought" 
(p. 154), and so forth. But on the whole M. Bergson ascribes the 
falsity of our idea of matter to an influence of mind: for example, to 
"intellect" (p. 190), "memory" (p. 76), "perception" (p. 178), "will" 
(p. 278). On the other hand he ordinarily traces the falsification of 
our psychology to some material influence; to "body" (p. 233), "mate- 
rial needs of life" (p. 185), "needs of the body" (p. 47), "images drawn 
from space" (p. 191), "space" (p. 293), and so forth. Since M. Bergson 
defines the body, on the whole, as a center of action, and mind as a 
practical instrument, it is from action that he derives the positive 
characteristics by the absence of which he defines real mind and real 
matter; and which, illegitimately present in mind and in matter, he 
traces back in the one case to matter and in the other to mind. Let 
us observe the ambiguous position and definition of action in M. 
Bergson's dualism, and its changeable status in the scheme of his 
philosophical values. 

Sometimes M. Bergson finds the source of the imperfection of our 
knowledge of all things in an indefinite practise to which the real is 
adapted (p. 239) ; the internal and external continuities of pure intui- 
tion being thus displaced by distinct words and independent objects, 
respectively. Just because the adaptation is in the interest of practise, 
it is argued (p. 240), this adaptation does not follow the internal lines 
of the structure of things. Philosophy should consequently seek expe- 
rience "above that decisive turn where . . . [it takes] a bias in the 
direction of utility" (p. 241); our ordinary and scientific knowledge, at 
this point, is not relative to the fundamental structure of our minds, 



44 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

according to M. Bergson, nor to the real nature of matter, but only to 
matter "disorganized, and to the superficial and acquired habits" of 
our mind. On the contrary, when M. Bergson is engaged with the con- 
struction of his psychology he treats action as "the fundamental law 
of our psychical life" (p. 234) ; as "the fundamental law of life" (p. 194) ; 
and as "a faculty . . . towards which all the powers of the organized 
body are seen to converge" (p. 67). Science, at this point, is regarded 
as essentially true, because, although it is symbolic, "philosophy is 
bound to ask why . . . [the symbols of science] are more convenient 
than others, and why they permit of further advance" (p. 266). 

Since physics and psychology formulate their subject-matters in 
abstract and, therefore, distinct terms, the fundamental discrepancy 
between science and the field of immediate experience is that the latter 
presents continuities, the former discontinuities. Whenever M. Berg- 
son is not in the constructive phase of his psychological work, conse- 
quently; whenever, that is, he insists on the distinction between ordi- 
nary knowledge and philosophical or pure knowledge, he treats action 
as a discontinuous function. When discontinuous action is lodged in 
the mind it is continuous matter that gets falsified by its influence; 
but when action is material, mind receives the spurious discontinuity 
from the material division of the world. Thus: "Homogeneous space 
and homogeneous time . . . express . . . the . . . work . 
of division which we effect on the moving continuity of the real in 
order to obtain there a fulcrum for our action . . ." (p. 280). 
" . . . the divisibility of matter is entirely relative to our action 
thereon . . ." (p. 292). Homogeneous space ". . . interests 
the behavior of a being which acts upon matter, but not the work of a 
mind which speculates on its essence" (p. 293). The atom " . . . 
is hardly anything but an outward projection of human needs . . ." 
(p. 269). Contrarily: "The impotence of speculative reason . . . 
is perhaps at bottom only the impotence of an intellect enslaved to 
certain necessities of bodily life . . ." (p. 241). " . . .we are 
. . . accustomed to reverse, for the sake of action, the real order 
of things, we are so strongly obsessed by images drawn from space 
. . ." (p. 191). " . . .we extend to the series of memories, 
in time, that . . . which applies only to the collection of bodies 
instantaneously perceived in space. The fundamental illusion con- 
sists in transferring to duration itself, in its continuous flow, the 
form of the instantaneous sections which we make in it" (p. 193). 
(The material world has been defined as such a section, p. 178.) "It 
is certain that mind, first of all, stands over against matter as a pure 
unity in face of an essentially divisible multiplicity . . ." (p. 235). 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 45 

Seeing that memory and perception are not stably localized in 
M. Bergson's scheme, as has been shown above, we find that these 
elements of his argument take on successively the properties of genuine 
reality and of vitiated or vitiating reality. M. Bergson has it, for 
example, that perception (p. 237) is part of the material world; that 
matter is, therefore, of the nature of perception, which in turn is 
mental, since perception is largely the creation of memory. From this 
he concludes that, philosophically, mind and matter are essentially 
the same, since the discontinuity of perceived qualities must be 
reflected in real matter (p. 238), which, were it pure quantity or homo- 
geneity, would be nothing at all. Here the condensation effected by 
memory is constitutive of genuine reality. In fact: " , . . the 
external object yields to us deeper and deeper parts of itself, as 
our memory adopts a correspondingly higher degree of tension . . ." 
(p. 145). The greater or less degree of this tension expresses the 
greater or less intensity of life (p. 279). Nevertheless, being active for 
thesakeof utility memory "supplants" real intuition (p. 71). ". . . 
the philosophy of matter must aim ... at eliminating the con- 
tributions of memory" (p. 80). " . . . our memory solidifies 
. . . the continuous flow of things" (p. 279). The basic error of 
philosophy is to regard memory as an operation of pure knowledge, 
neglecting its relation with conduct; memory is turned toward action 
(p. 302). But, to return to the other position: " . . . memory is 
. . . essentially a knowledge . . . [addressed to a pure spirit, as 
having a purely speculative interest]" (p. 125). Again, action abolishes 
memory since it is useless (p. 186); action causes memory to shrink 
into the impersonal (p. 130); to remember one must withdraw from 
action; one "must have the power to value the useless" (p. 94). But: 
Action employs memory (p. 188) ; action, to be adequate to its circum- 
stances, requires memory (p. 198). 

In the same way perception plays various parts, sometimes as a 
source of illegitimate discontinuity, sometimes as the bearer of that 
continuity which marks out reality itself. To "obtain a vision of 
matter," says M. Bergson (p. 276), "... pure, and freed from all 
that the exigencies of life compel you to add to it in external perception 
. . . try to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily 
experience . . ." (p. 276), and consider the mobility of the qualities 
of these objects: That undivided act which our consciousness becomes 
aware of in our own movements . . . " "Our perception . . . 
terminates . . . [the objects of the material universe] at the point 
where our possible action upon them ceases. . . . Such is the pri- 
mary . . . operation of the perceiving mind : it marks out divisions 



46 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

in the continuity of the extended . . ." (p. 278). But is not then 
the discontinuity real at least in action? No; for, "the duration 
wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should 
see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated and juxta- 
posed. The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states 
melt into each other. It is within this that we should try to replace 
ourselves by thought, in the exceptional and unique case when we 
speculate on the intimate nature of human action . . ." (p. 243). 
Moreover, the "opposition between perception and matter is the 
artificial work of an understanding which decomposes and recomposes 
according to its habits or its laws: it is not given in immediate intui- 
tion" (p. 326). 

Our expectation that M. Bergson's reform of dualism in Matter 
and Memory, based on the attempt to identify matter with pure expe- 
rience, would issue in various contradictions, has been justified by the 
preceding citations, which by no means, however, exhaust the cata- 
logue of ambiguities that might be drawn up from M. Bergson's book. 
From the point of view of the theory of knowledge the difference 
between Time and Free-Will and Matter and Memory is not great, 
since M. Bergson's epistemological assumptions are identical in the 
two books. He assumes that perfect knowledge is wholly similar to 
its object, and endeavors to combine this view with the dualistic 
theory, which, as has been noted already, separates knowledge and 
objeet-of -knowledge from one another. The attempt, in Time and 
Free-Will, resulted in a capital ambiguity as to whether mind and mat- 
ter, or quality and quantity, are together or separate; in Matter and 
Memory it resulted in an ambiguity as to whether matter is or is not 
the same as our immediate perception, and whether our perception is 
or is not the same as mind. The tendency of thought that brought 
matter and mind together in Time and Free-Will, made matter and 
perception, and perception and mind, coincide alternately; in the first 
case the epistemological scheme of dualism was preserved by changing 
the sense in which the "confusion" of quality and quantity had been 
affirmed ; from factual the confusion came to be treated as suppositional. 
In the second case the dualistic scheme was preserved, on the whole, 
by changing the kind of perception with which mind and matter were 
allowed alternately to coincide. When matter had been brought up to 
perception, the perception with which it coincided was different from 
mind in lacking the depth conferred by a condensation of memories, 
relatively or absolutely; but as matter receded from perception, per- 
ception was defined as thickened by memories legitimately. This 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 47 

change in the definition of perception corresponds to the working out, 
first in physics and then in psychology, of the implication of the resem- 
blance-theory of knowledge that knowledge shall coincide with its 
object. There is also a tendency in Matter and Memory, less elaborate, 
but more fundamental, to give up the distinction between physics and 
psychology, shown in the characterizing of matter by the traits of real 
mind — as where matter is distinguished from extension by means of 
memory (p. 296) ; or where the mental is spoken of as drawing nearer 
to extension "in the measure in which it evolves towards actuality" 
(p. 294) ? 

Matter and Memory, we may then say, is related to the development 
of M. Bergson's epistemological science of the immediate as follows: 
The distance between Time and Free-Will and Matter and Memory is 
measured by the admission, embodied in the latter work, that imme- 
diate experience is extended. This admission carries with it the impli- 
cation that in some sense matter is present in immediate experience. 
But since M. Bergson's first step was the condemnation of all psy- 
chology as not reflecting its subject-matter — the immediate, his second 
step, following on the admission that matter is in the immediate, is 
to condemn, in some sense, all physics, which distinguishes matter 
from immediate experience itself. And since M. Bergson must provide, 
or at any rate promise, some substitute for the psychological and 
physical sciences he condemns, he is led to redefine the immediate in 
the one case as real mind and in the other case as real matter, in terms of 
his condemnation of ordinary psychology and physics. From these 
redefinitions he derives one or more sets of immediate data of conscious- 
ness, which he takes to be the real immediate and the real object of 
philosophical knowledge, or that knowledge itself. Basing his con- 
demnation of psychology in Time and Free-Will on the idea that if 
mind and matter are distinct they must be dissimilar, he defines his 
real mind as not whatever matter may be, and alters this negative 
definition, as we have seen, into a more or less arbitrary ascription of 
positive attributes to the mind. In Matter and Memory M. Bergson 
fastens on the practical character of the mental faculties and, playing 
these off against his view that knowledge should resemble, and hence, in 
the limit, coincide with, its object, he defines the really-known — 
mental and material — as possessed of a nature opposite to the nature he 
more or less loosely connects with practise. Hence again, as in Time 
and Free-Will, M. Bergson defines his philosophical or epistemological 
reality in negative terms, and inasmuch as both the mental and 
material aspects of reality are defined as non-practical, real mind and 

7 Cf. pp. 238, 241, 267, 268, 269, 270, 275, 282, 293. 



48 LOGIC of bergson's philosophy 

real matter are alike on the terms of M. Bergson's deduction; and 
action, the source of the double corruption, has no abiding place in 
reality, but wanders from mind to matter and back again. 

Seeing that Matter and Memory comprises for the most part a demon- 
stration of the practical nature of mind, there is little elaboration of 
the negative definition of real mind and real matter as what is un- 
adapted to action; we are told merely here and there in the course of 
the book, that if perception and memory were not practical, if they 
were not analytical and discriminative, that is, illuminating reality 
fitfully, we should have a genuine philosophical knowledge of matter 
and mind. The elaboration of these epistemological implications 
must be studied in M. Bergson's later work, An Introduction to Meta- 
physics, where the process of reflection that led him to include the 
science of physics under the head of imperfect or non-philosophical 
knowledge, along with psychology, receives a clear and comprehensive 
formulation. 

(2) AN INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 

In An Introduction to Metaphysics the epistemological assumptions 
that underlie M. Bergson's philosophical work first explicitly come to 
the surface of his thought. We have shown that the doctrine of Time 
and Free-Will originates in the observation of a discrepancy between 
the subject-matter of psychology and the terms of that science, and 
that the metaphysics of matter put forward in Matter and Memory is 
based on the fact that physics is a science of immediate experience : on 
the discrepancy, that is, between the world of the concrete, unique, 
and altering objects that play on our organs of sense, and the world of 
the abstract, invariable elements that physics describes. The funda- 
mental spring of M. Bergson's objections to psychology and physics 
is thus the fact that these sciences do not absolutely resemble, that is, 
coincide with, their objects. From the condemnation of the sciences 
of mind and matter on this score an easy step brings one to the con- 
demnation of all natural science on the same ground; and the taking 
of this step is precisely what separates An Introduction to Metaphysics 
from Matter and Memory. 

In An Introduction to Metaphysics M. Bergson classes all scientific 
knowledge as relative over against metaphysical or philosophical 
knowledge, which is absolute. He leaves to scientific knowledge a 
certain qualified validity and is less severe in condemning natural 
science as a whole than he was in condemning analytical psychology 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 49 

in Time and Free-Will, for naturally the validity of physics is more 
difficult to explain away than whatever validity associationistic psy- 
chology may be said to possess. That the reasons for M. Bergson's 
refusal to admit that the knowledge furnished by any natural science is 
philosophically genuine are the same as his reasons for objecting to 
psychology and physics, however, can without difficulty be shown by 
reference to numerous passages in his book. 

M. Bergson introduces the argument of An Introduction to Meta- 
physics with the statement that philosophers agree in distinguishing 
two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing: a relative way 
and an absolute. Relative knowledge, he pursues, implies that from a 
point of view external to the object we express the object by means of 
symbols; whereas absolute knowledge is dependent on no symbol 
(p. 1), but implies the insertion (p. 2) of the subject into the object by 
imagination, the identification (p. 3) of subject with object in a simple 
feeling, or, in another word, the "coincidence" (p. 4) of the knowing 
subject with what is known. Relative knowledge (p. 7) is acquired by 
analysis; absolute knowledge, on the contrary, by "intuition." Analy- 
sis, M. Bergson says (p. 7), is the operation which reduces the object 
to elements common to both it and to other objects, and intuition is 
that by which one places oneself within an object in order to coin- 
cide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. 

It is obvious that we are dealing here with a generalization of the 
distinction made by M. Bergson between the anti-material psychology 
and the ordinary psychology of Time and Free-Will, and the meta- 
physics of matter and the science of physics in Matter and Memory. 
If we note what the subject-matter of absolute or intuitive knowledge 
is given as, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, we shall have further 
evidence that the book formulates epistemological assumptions that 
were implicit in M. Bergson's preceding work. He describes intuition 
(p. 9) as the instrument by which we seize on our own personality, on 
our self which endures, if on nothing else. This self as given in intuition 
is (p. 1 1) a "continuous flux" in which all so-called states interpenetrate; 
it is a "pure duration" (p. 13) in which no two identical moments (p. 12) 
occur; something not capable of being represented by concepts (p. 15), 
that is, "abstract" or "general" ideas, nor even by images, although 
images have the advantage over concepts (p. 16) of keeping us in the 
concrete. In most men the awareness of their own consciousness is 
" fettered by habits of mind more useful to life" (p. 16). Abstract 
ideas symbolize the impersonal aspects of objects; they generalize, 
and hence " . . . are incapable of replacing intuition, that is, the 
metaphysical investigation of what is essential and unique in the object" 



50 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

(p. 1 8). " . . . analysis operates always on the immobile, whilst 
intuition places itself in mobility, or what comes to the same thing, in 
duration. There lies the very distinct line of demarcation between 
intuition and analysis. The real, the experienced, and the concrete 
are recognized by the fact that they are variability itself" (p. 47). 

If the intuitional science of An Introduction to Metaphysics is a gen- 
eralization not only of the anti-material psychology of Time ancL Free- 
Will, but of the metaphysics of matter of Matter and Memory as well, 
we should be able to show that matter, for intuition, is a form of dura- 
tion: a perceived object different from our ordinary perception in not 
being thickened by the pressure of memory. " . . .if intuition 
has the mobility of duration as its object," writes M. Bergson, "and 
if duration is of a psychical nature, shall we not be confining the 
philosopher to the exclusive contemplation of himself" (p. 55)? No. 
"The consciousness we have of our own self in its continual flux 
introduces us to the interior of a reality, on the model of which we 
must represent other realities" (p. 65). " . . . the intuition 
of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure 
analysis would do, brings us into contact with a whole continuity of 
durations which we must try to follow, whether downwards or upwards 
. . . In both cases we transcend ourselves. In the first we advance 
towards a more and more attenuated duration, the pulsations of 
which, being rapider than ours, and dividing our simple sensation, 
dilute its quality into quantity ; at the limit would be pure homogene- 
ity, that pure repetition by which we define materiality. Advancing in 
the other direction, we approach a duration which . . . intensifies 
itself more and more; ... at the limit would be eternity" (p. 63). 

Intuitional metaphysics is distinguished from positive science, in its 
original definitions, at least, by the same traits that distinguish M. 
Bergson's earlier more special sciences of the immediate from the 
sciences he would have had them replace. Metaphysics is not an 
"expression, translation, or symbolic representation" (p. 9) of its ob- 
ject; it is not "useful" (p. 16); not an "artificial reconstruction of its 
object" (p. 18); not a "shadow" (p. 19); it is "disinterested" (p. 40), 
"a reversal of the usual work of the intellect" (p. 40) ; it is independent 
of "homogeneous time" (p. 46), and of homogeneous space (p. 52), 
and it does not represent to itself states and things by fixing the undi- 
vided mobility of the real (p. 65), as do language, common sense, and 
practical life" (p. 66). Significantly, at the same time that he includes 
all positive scientific knowledge in the class of relative, philosophically 
imperfect knowledge, M. Bergson grants to psychology the right to 
the use of analysis. "Psychology . . . proceeds like all the other 



LOGIC OF BERGSON S PHILOSOPHY 51 

sciences by analysis. It resolves the self . . . into sensations, 
feelings, ideas, etc. . . ." (p. 24). "... without this effort of 
abstraction or analysis there would be no possible development of the 
science of psychology" (p. 25). "On the level at which the psycholo- 
gist places himself, and on which he must place himself . . . " 
there is "nothing else to do but analyze personality . . ." (p. 30). 

Thus it is here M. Bergson's view that all of the natural sciences are 
valuable and adequate as natural sciences, but that since the unique- 
ness and concreteness of experience escape from the formulations of 
science, something else, metaphysics, must be found to capture what 
concepts are unable to fix. It is the thesis of this dissertation that in 
the course of his successive attempts to tell what such an epistemo- 
logically necessitated science of the complete concrete unique imme- 
diate would be M. Bergson invariably falls back on some aspect of the 
ordinary science he condemns and that this renunciation of the strict 
definition of his supplementary science, tells, in a measure, against the 
theory of knowledge in which the notion that subject knows object 
in the degree of their resemblance had its start. It remains, conse- 
quently, for us to show that the intuitional science of An Introduction 
to Metaphysics is identified, in the progress of M. Bergson's exposition, 
with the positive science from which, theoretically, it should be dis- 
tinct. 

M. Bergson defines metaphysics as the science which claims to 
dispense with symbols (p. 9). " . . . the main object of meta- 
physics is to do away with symbols" (p. 79). 8 But he modifies this 
view elsewhere, saying that true empiricism, which is the true meta- 
physics (p. 36) " . . .is obliged for each new object that it studies 
to make an absolutely fresh effort. It cuts out for the object a concept 
which is appropriate to that object alone, a concept which as yet can 
hardly be called a concept . . ." (p. 37). " . .• . metaphysics 
. . . if it is a serious occupation of the mind . . . must transcend 
concepts. . . . Certainly concepts are necessary to it, for all the 
other sciences work as a rule with concepts, and metaphysics can not 
dispense with the other sciences. But it is only truly itself when it 
goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself from rigid and 
ready-made concepts . . ." (p. 21). 

At one time M. Bergson writes as though the use of intuition 
marked off metaphysics from science (p. 30); at another he speaks 
of positive science as passing "immediately to analysis" on getting 
its material from an intuition which "one must add" is "very indis- 

» Cf. pp. is. 18, 30. 



52 LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 

tinct" (p. 32). But again he explains that as to the relativity of scien- 
tific knowledge, "what is relative is the symbolic knowledge by pre- 
existing concepts . . ." (p. 74). "Science and metaphysics . . . 
come together in intuition. A truly intuitive philosophy would . 
make of metaphysics a positive science . . . " " . . .all that 
is greatest in the sciences, as well as all that is permanent in meta- 
physics" (p. 70) is due to intuition (p. 69). 9 Yet, in the early portion 
of his exposition (p. 24) the "confusion between the function of 
analysis and that of intuition" is spoken of as the chief source of philo- 
sophical controversies. Although in certain passages M. Bergson 
separates metaphysics from positive science by confining science to a 
consideration of what is immobile and unreal, 10 in other passages he 
writes of positive science as working in the real and mobile. 11 Thus 
there are sometimes two varieties of knowledge, sometimes all knowl- 
edge is one: "A comparison of the definitions of metaphysics 
. . . leads to the discovery that philosophers, in spite of their 
apparent divergencies, agree in distinguishing two profoundly different 
ways of knowing a thing. . . . The first depends on the point of 
view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express 
ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies 
on any symbol" (p. 1). M. Bergson goes on to attach the name of 
metaphysics to this second sort of knowledge, as we observed above. 
But later on (p. 74), he speaks of the need of putting more science into 
metaphysics and more metaphysics into science. Finally he says (p. 
75), "That there are not two different ways of knowing things funda- 
mentally ... is what the ancient philosophers generally thought. 
Their error did not lie there." 

Looking over the aspects of positive science with which M. Bergson 
identifies intuitional science, when he gives up his strict definition of 
metaphysics, we find that metaphysics becomes identified sometimes 
with a fragment of the doctrine of positive science, as with the infi- 
nitesimal calculus (p. 70), or with "modern mathematics," which "is 
precisely an effort to substitute the being made for the ready made 
. to grasp motion no longer from without and in its displayed 
result, but from within and in its tendency to change ; in short to adopt 
the mobile continuity of the outlines of things." 12 Or again, meta- 
physics is identified with the original strokes of genius that enabled 
men of intellect to advance positive science: " . . .a profoundly- 
considered history of human thought would show that we owe to" 

• Cf. pp. 81, 82, 83. 

10 See pp. 26, 27, 43. 44. 45, 46, 47. 48, 62, 67. 

11 Cf. pp. 75. 76, 87. 
10 Cf. p. 77. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 53 

(p. 70) the inversion of our habitual or practical habits of thought "all 
that is greatest in the sciences . . . " 13 Finally, M. Bergson 
identifies metaphysics (p. 90) with a state of the mind reached by 
means of a study of the "sura of observations and experience gathered 
together by positive science" (p. 91); "something in philosophers" 
(p. 88) and not "fixed and dead in theses." We shall now prosecute 
the investigation of intuitional metaphysics, and of the manner of its 
renunciation, in Creative Evolution and in one or two of the occasional 
addresses of M. Bergson. 

(3) CREATIVE EVOLUTION 

Creative Evolution illustrates in two ways M. Bergson's renunciation 
of the strict definition of his metaphysical or intuitional science. First 
the renunciation is presented in terms which are nearly identical with 
the terms in which he formulated the doctrine of his preceding work; 
and secondly it is presented in terms of a theory of evolutionary biol- 
ogy. To begin with we shall point out the biological aspect of the 
subject of our study, and then briefly indicate the passages in which 
the contradictions common to An Introduction to Metaphysics and 
Creative Evolution may be found. 

In his biological theory M. Bergson identifies the activity of instinct, 
especially as manifested in the life of certain species of insects, with 
the intuition which separates metaphysics from positive science. 
" . . . instinct and intelligence imply two radically different kinds 
of knowledge" (p. 143). "Intelligence by means of science which is 
its work, will deliver up to us more and more completely the secret of 
physical operations; of life it brings us, and moreover only claims to 
bring us, a translation. But it is to the very inwardness of life that 
intuition leads us . . .by intuition I mean instinct that has become 
disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and 
of enlarging it indefinitely" (p. 176). "The theory of knowledge must 
take account of these two faculties, intellect and intuition . . . for 
want of establishing a sufficiently clear distinction between them it 
becomes involved in inextricable difficulties" (p. 178). Now first of 
all it will be shown that the distinction M. Bergson draws between 
instinct and intelligence is epistemological rather than biological in 
origin, since the distinction is not required by M. Bergson's biological 
philosophy, but, on the contrary, is in opposition thereto. 

What biological arguments are advanced in Creative Evolution in 
favor of radically distinguishing instinct from intelligence in connec- 

13 C/. pp. 3i, 32, 86, 87. 



54 LOGIC OF bergson's philosophy 

tion with the theory of knowledge? In a great many passages of his 
book M. Bergson reasons sub-audibly that since evolution is a differ- 
entiation along lines that diverge, the process of vital development 
necessarily grew into diverse modes of knowing. "The cardinal error 
which, from Aristotle onwards, has vitiated most of the philosophies of 
nature," he says, "is to see in vegetative, instinctive, and rational 
life, three successive degrees of the development of one and the same 
tendency, whereas they are divergent directions of an activity that 
has split up as it grew" (p. 135). Our reason for believing that the 
view, according to which life evolves into forms which exhibit dis- 
similar modes of noetic activity is by no means essential or even 
natural in M. Bergson's biology, is to be found in the general trend of 
his contentions concerning the character of life. The course of bio- 
logical development as described by himself is a continual elaboration 
of certain originally interpenetrating potentialities or tendencies, which 
spread and unfold into innumerable forms; nevertheless, inasmuch 
as life is single in its origin, the end-products of evolution are supposed 
to participate in a common character. " . . . when species have 
begun to diverge . . . they accentuate their divergence as they 
progress. . . . Yet, in certain definite points they may evolve 
identically; in fact, they must do so if the hypothesis of a common 
impetus be accepted" (p. 87). Indeed the very argument by which M. 
Bergson aims to refute mechanism in biology depends on his demon- 
stration that the various developments of life may eventuate in like 
organs, expressive of an identical underlying impulse which breaks out 
at very distantly separated points of time and space. 14 Thus it is 
argued that although no complicated visual organ had appeared at 
that point of the geneological tree of life where the ancestors of verte- 
brates and molluscs parted company with one another, the eye in man 
and in the pecten present an astonishing similarity of structure, and 
that consequently the essential uniformity of life has been proved. 
If it should be objected to our exposition that vertebrates and molluscs 
are nearer akin than men and wasps or similar insects, it could be 
answered that, although animals and plants are still more remote from 
each other than molluscs and vertebrates, M. Bergson mentions (p. 59) 
the parallel progress that has been accomplished in the animal and 
vegetable divisions of evolution in the direction of sexuality, as evi- 
dence supporting his theory of the homogeneity of life. Moreover, 
if there is no innate tendency in the various branches of developing 
life towards the elaboration of dissimilar faculties of reproduction, the 
tendency towards diversity would be even less likely to manifest itself 

14 See pp. 54, 55, 56, 87, 96, 112. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 55 

in the faculty of understanding, which, in M. Bergson's own words is 
1 . . . a more and more precise . . . and supple adaptation of 
the consciousness of living beings to the conditions of existence that 
are made for them" (p. ix). For must not insects and vertebrates adapt 
themselves to similar conditions of life? We conclude, then, that it is 
not the investigation of biological facts that led M. Bergson to regard 
instinct as a kind of philosophical intuition, but that he has introduced 
foregone epistemological conclusions, formulated in An Introduction 
to Metaphysics, into his treatment of biology. 

Taking it for granted that the distinction drawn between instinct 
and intelligence in Creative Evolution is a transposition of the distinc- 
tion established in An Introduction to Metaphysics between intuition 
and intellect, we proceed to note the marks by which instinct is con- 
tradistinguished from intelligence in the context of M. Bergson's 
biology. When he fulfilled the requirements of his initial epistemo- 
logical assumptions, M. Bergson assigned the task of knowing concrete 
uniqueness or duration or mobility to intuition. In the same vein it 
is written in Creative Evolution that "In order to get at . . . [the 
cardinal difference between instinct and intelligence] we must . . . 
go straight to the two objects, profoundly different from each other, 
upon which instinct and intelligence are directed" (p. 146). "Of im- 
mobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea" (p. 155). "The 
intellect is not made to think evolution, in the proper sense of the word 
— that is to say, the continuity of a change that is pure mobility" (p. 
163). "The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to com- 
prehend life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form 
of life" (p. 165). "Instinct is sympathy. If this sympathy could 
extend its object and also reflect upon itself, it would give us the key 
to vital operations . . . just as intelligence, developed and disci- 
plined, guides us into matter. For — we can not too often repeat it — 
intelligence and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former 
towards inert matter, the latter towards life" (p.^76). "The double 
form of consciousness is . . . due to the double form of the real 
. . . " (p. 178). Now, just as in A n Introduction to Metaphysics we 
found M. Bergson giving up his distinction between the metaphysics 
of pure duration and the positive science of abstractions or repetitious 
elements in experience, so here instinct and intelligence, separated 
rigorously in the above-cited passages, are united again in other clearly 
phrased portions of M. Bergson's text. Reversing his proposition that 
the knowledges of matter and of life fall to intelligence and instinct, 
respectively, M. Bergson says " . . .we see in these two modes of 
psychical activity [instinct and intelligence] above all else, two 



56 LOGIC of bergson's philosophy 

different methods of action on inert matter" (p. 136). Again: " Instinct 
and intelligence . . . represent two divergent solutions, equally 
fitting, of one and the same problem" (p. 143). [The problem of 
action.] 

We may expect that in discussing the methods of biology and 
the value of ordinary biological science M. Bergson will shift from 
the contention that ordinary analytical biology is inadequate to its 
object, to the admission that instinctive or intuitive metaphysics is no 
scientific substitute for positive science, but something of a quite 
different sort. In fact, M. Bergson tells us (p. 198) that conceptual 
physics touches the absolute, but that " . . . it is by accident — 
chance or convention, as you please — that science obtains a hold on 
the living analogous to the hold it has on matter. Here the use of con- 
ceptual frames is no longer natural . . . the further [science] . . . 
penetrates the depths of life, the more symbolic, the more relative to 
the contingencies of action the knowledge it supplies to us becomes. 
On this new ground, philosophy ought, then, to follow science in order 
to superpose on scientific truth a knowledge of another kind, which 
may be called metaphysical." 15 From having followed M. Bergson's 
attempt to formulate into a scientific or metaphysical knowledge the 
naked fact that immediate experience is undivided and novel in its 
unrationalized phases we are enabled to anticipate the nature of his 
proposed substitute or complement for scientific biology, which is an 
experience, namely, of the pure quality, or duration, or genuine con- 
sciousness, of Matter and Memory and Time and Free-Will. In order 
to transcend intelligence, for the purpose of apprehending life, it is 
thus proposed that we " . . . seek in the depths of our experience 
the point where we feel ourselves most intimately within our own life. 
It is into pure duration that we then plunge back" (p. 199). And there 
we find a past " swelling unceasingly" and moving on into a " present 
that is absolutely new" (p. 200). We are told to seek ourselves where 
"our actions are truly free," and thus to replace ourselves in life; a life 
which is a state of consciousness "incommensurable with the intellect, 
being itself indivisible and new." 

M. Bergson sometimes argues in general that intelligence can not 
know life because intelligence, which has been molded on matter for 
the sake of action, differs from life as the part from the whole (p. x), 
and, consequently, can not be "applied to the evolutionary movement 
itself. " And he argues in particular that since intelligence and instinct 
are differentiated parts of a whole (p. 174), instinct is not "resolvable 
into intelligent elements," or even "into terms entirely intelligible." 

15 Cf. pp. 174. 175, 196, 197. 207, 342, 343. 359, 360. 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 57 

It is in "the phenomena of feeling" ... he continues (p. 175), 
that "we experience in ourselves . . . something of what must 
happen in the consciousness of an insect acting by instinct." With 
this evidence that, epistemologically speaking, M. Bergson still clings 
to the resemblance-theory of knowledge, we go on to note that the 
chief difficulties already recorded in our consideration of Time and 
Free-Will, Matter and Memory, and An Introduction to Metaphysics 
reappear in the course of Creative Evolution. 

These chief difficulties uniformly grow out of the fact that although 
the abstract terms of all of the natural sciences are discrepant in kind 
from their subject-matter — concrete immediate experience — M. Berg- 
son infers from his observation of this discrepancy that natural science 
is not genuinely scientific, reasoning from the premise that knowledge 
must copy its object. At first M. Bergson accepted conceptual physics 
as adequate on the supposition that physics is not a science of imme- 
diate experience, and confined his attack on science to associationistic 
psychology. But on admitting immediate experience to be extended 
he was led to condemn ordinary physics as well, since physics resembles 
psychology in being abstract. From the citations above in which 
M. Bergson lays it down that intelligence is naturally adapted to 
matter, it might have appeared that he had established himself in a 
view dissimilar to the general view expressed in An Introduction to 
Metaphysics, according to which all analytical or symbolical knowl- 
edge is relative and unsatisfactory in part. But he writes of intelli- 
gence as providing a genuine philosophical knowledge of the material 
world only when he treats of action as being a function of life really 
exercised in a portion of reality endowed with the characteristics to 
which our activity relates. Thus: " . . . our intellect, " he writes 
(p. ix), " . . . is intended to secure the perfect fitting of our body 
to its environment, to represent the relations of external things among 
themselves — in short, to think matter." "Action can not move in 
the unreal ... an intellect bent upon the act to be performed and 
the reaction to follow . . . is an intellect that touches something 
of the absolute" (p. xi). 16 And when, on the other hand, M. Bergson 
is reasoning from the premise of the resemblance epistemology in 
which he persists, he reverts to the view, expounded in An Introduc- 
tion to Metaphysics, that all species of conceptual science are false, 
reversing his estimate of the epistemological value of physical science. 
For instance, "From mobility itself," he tells us (p. 155), "our intellect 
turns aside, because it has nothing to gain in dealing with it. If the 
intellect were meant for pure theorizing, it would take its place within 

18 Cf. pp. 198 and 207. 



58 LOGIC of bergson's philosophy 

movement, for movement is reality itself . . . But ... to the 
stable and unchangeable our intellect is attached by virtue of its 
natural disposition. " "Matter or mind, " M. Bergson writes in another 
passage (p. 272), "reality has appeared to us as a perpetual becoming. 

. . . Such is the intuition that we have of mind when we draw 
aside the veil which is interposed between our consciousness and our- 
selves. This, also, is what our intellect and senses themselves would 
show us of matter, if they could obtain a direct and disinterested idea 
of it. But, preoccupied before everything with the necessities of 
action, the intellect, like the senses, is limited to taking, at intervals, 
views that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile of the 
becoming of matter." 

We noted that in Matter and Memory the action to which M. Berg- 
son ascribes the role of falsifying our knowledge of things is a philo- 
sophical element of indeterminate locus. This indetermination takes 
its rise, in the final analysis, in the fact that there is no room, on M. 
Bergson's epistemological premises, in either matter or mind, for any 
source of the falsification of immediate experience; since the genuine 
matter and mind of M. Bergson's dualism coincide with each other 
in what is immediate. Action, as long as action is regarded as possess- 
ing the properties that falsify reality, is transferred from matter to 
mind and from mind to matter, according to the circumstances of 
M. Bergson's discussion. Similarly, in Creative Evolution, as long as 
the epistemological motive dominates the course of his thought, it is 
impossible to trace the characteristics of action, that appear in reality 
as falsifications, to any permanent position in the world of M. Berg- 
son's philosophical discourse. Taking discontinuity as a property of 
reality falsified, we find it contended (p. 11) that were action sup- 
pressed, the lines traced in the entanglement of the real would disap- 
pear, and bodies would be reabsorbed in the "universal interaction 
which ... is reality itself." " . . . the subdivision of matter 
into separate bodies is relative to our perception . . ." (p. 12). 
"Of the discontinuous alone does the intellect form a clear idea" says 
M. Bergson (p. 154), after explaining that our manipulations require 
us to regard the material object as "provisionally final." The possi- 
bility of our doing this, he continues, is due to the continuity of mate- 
rial extension, which continuity, in turn, "is nothing else but our 
ability ... to choose the mode of discontinuity we shall find in 

. . . [matter]." Concepts are defined (p. 160) as representations 
of the act by which the intellect fixes on concrete things. Logic is 
spoken of as derived from solids. " . . . the intellect behaves as 
if it were fascinated by the contemplation of inert matter. It is life 



LOGIC OF BERGSONS PHILOSOPHY 59 

looking outward . . . adopting the ways of unorganized nature 
. . . in order to direct them . . ." (p. 161), " . . .to 
modify an object we have to perceive it as divisible and discontinu- 
ous" (p. 162). Further, M. Bergson explains (p. 299) that since 
intellect presides over actions, and only the results of actions interest 
us, we overlook the movements that are in action, seeing only (p. 300) 
the image of the movement accomplished. ''Now in order that it 
may represent as unmovable the result of the act which is being accom- 
plished, the intellect must perceive, as also unmovable, the surround- 
ings in which this result is being framed. " "In order that our activity 
may leap from act to act, it is necessary that matter should pass from 
state to state . . . " Finally, M. Bergson writes: " . . . that 
action may ... be enlightened, intelligence must be present in it, 
but intelligence in order thus to accompany the progress of activity 
. . . must begin by adopting its rhythm. Action is discontinuous, like 
every pulsation of life; discontinuous, therefore, is knowledge" (p. 307). 
Again, we find that the novelty of reality is obscured by the effect 
of conduct on intellect (p. 29). "The intellect can no more admit 
complete novelty than real becoming . . . here again it lets an 
essential aspect of life escape . . ." (p. 164). It applies its princi- 
ple "like produces like," which constitutes common sense (p. 29). 
"Science carries this faculty to the highest possible degree of exacti- 
tude and precision, but does not alter its essential character. . . . 
Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat itself ... on 
what is withdrawn . . . from the action of real time." On the 
other hand, in another connection, M. Bergson writes: " . . .in 
the field of physics itself, the scientists who are pushing the study of 
their science furthest incline to believe that we can not reason about 
the parts as we reason about the whole. . . . Thereby they tend 
to place themselves in the concrete duration in which alone there is 
true generation and not only composition of parts" (p. 368). "The 
primal function of perception is precisely to grasp a series of . . . 
changes under the form of a . . . simple state, by a work of con- 
densation" (p. 301). But scientific analysis resolves these states into 
movements." " . . . it is always provisionally, and in order to 
satisfy our imagination, that we attach movement to a mobile. The 
mobile flies forever before the pursuit of science, which is concerned 
with mobility alone." 

So, through his various subject-matters M. Bergson rings the 
changes made possible by his incompatible premises. On the assump- 
tion that knowledge must resemble its object he condemns analy- 



60 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

tical psychology in Time and Free- Will and imagines a novel psychol- 
ogy which shall reflect the immediate and be the opposite of what, in 
general, the matter of physics is, on which the mind of the associa- 
tionistic psychologists was modeled. Hence, two novel definitions 
of mind — the unanalyzed immediate, and the immediate minus what- 
ever matter may be. When attacking the doctrine of analytical psy- 
chology M. Bergson opposes to the doctrine of associationism the 
simple fact that the immediate does not present itself in our every-day 
awareness as already analyzed into psychological elements; when he 
undertakes to formulate a new science of psychology he defines the 
immediate in terms of what he considers mind can not be, or, in 
other words, of what matter is. But, as we have seen, the definition 
of real mind by negations is unenlightening, and in the event, by an 
indirect process, gets altered into the ascription of positive attri- 
butes to the mind, which reduce it in part to the very mind that M. 
Bergson rejected to begin with. Again, on the assumption that knowl- 
edge must resemble its object, in Matter and Memory the material 
bodies described in physics are condemned as artificially selected from 
the continuity of experience for the purposes of action, and a meta- 
physics of matter is proposed that defines real matter as unanalyzed 
immediate experience, or as a complete interaction and interpenetra- 
tion of all of the contents of space. In the measure that M. Bergson 
proceeds from the disparagement of ordinary physics to the attempt to 
formulate a new doctrine of matter, by so much does he proceed from 
the view that genuine matter is simply the continuum of immediate 
experience to the view that matter is immediate experience minus 
the effect of the mind exerted through perception and memory. But, 
once more, in attempting to describe what the immediate would be 
unenforced and unselected by memory and perception, M. Bergson 
falls back on views of matter proposed by the exponents of stresses 
and strains in the ether, or lines of force, which, being an elaboration 
of the practical science of ordinary physics, he had begun by rejecting. 
In An Introduction to Metaphysics we find the same alteration in the 
definition of the subject-matter of intuitional metaphysics, as set over 
against the subject-matter of positive science. When M. Bergson 
evaluates conceptual science from the stand-point of epistemology, 
he condemns it as symbolic in all its parts, and the subject-matter of 
metaphysics is simply immediate experience unvitiated by points of 
view or by symbols ; but in filling in the definition of intuitional meta- 
physics he employs aspects of positive science to define a genuine 
immediate experience which thus is assimilated to the terms of science. 
Finally, in Creative Evolution when the distribution of the elements 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 6l 

of M. Bergson's thought is determined by his attack on science, the 
reality revealed by intuition is our immediate feeling of life; but when 
he offers an intuitional doctrine of reality, on the other hand, his 
doctrine of reality is made up of a portion of ordinary physics and of 
other branches of positive science. 

Summing up it may be said that whenever M. Bergson is pressing 
his attack on analytical, selective, conceptual science, pure duration 
is simply immediate experience; but that whenever he is trying to 
build up an intuitional psychology, physics, or biology, pure duration 
becomes more or less than ordinary concrete experience. The former 
view of the nature of pure duration is best expressed in M. Bergson's 
address on La Perception du Changement: " . . .in answer to 
those," writes M. Bergson (p. 26), "who suppose 'real duration' 
to be something or other mysterious and ineffable, I say that it is the 
clearest thing in the world: 'real duration' is what has always been 
called time, but time perceived as indivisible." Compare with this 
the following statement from Time and Free-Will (p. 106): " . . . 
we find it incroyablement difficile to think of duration in its original 
purity." Real change is described in La Perception du Changement 
(p. 27) as the "most substantial and durable of all things," although 
in defining the intuitional method in Matiere et Memoir e (Avant- 
Propos, p. iii.) M. Bergson speaks of interior change, which is duration, 
as of something difficult to seize in its "fleeting originality." True, 
the contrary view of the nature of immediate experience is presented 
in more than one passage of La Perception du Changement, as, 
for instance, where the ordinary data of our senses and of consciousness 
are asserted to be "relative" (p. 16). 

As a variation of the shift between the views that duration is 
immediate experience and that it is the movement to which physics 
reduces material atoms, we may compare M. Bergson's statement 
in La Perception du Changement (p. 25), that matter is proved to be 
really mobility by physical science, with the statement in Time and 
Free-Will (p. 206), that the movements in the ether to which atoms 
have been reduced are not actual movements ; " . . .all movement 
taking place within this fluid [the ether] is really equivalent to abso- 
lute immobility." Besides illustrating the ambiguities and contra- 
dictions to which we have become accustomed in studying M. Berg- 
son's principal works, La Perception du Changement brings out into 
special clearness the idea from which we have maintained that all of 
his epistemological writing proceeds, the idea, namely, that reality 
is simply unanalyzed experience, true in its own right, and that it 
is illegitimately affected by the action of concepts. 



62 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

Thus M. Bergson writes in La Perception du Changement (p. 5) that 
it will be agreed on all hands that if our faculty of perception were 
unlimited we should never need to have recourse to the faculty of 
reasoning. Concepts are makeshift substitutes for percepts, he says, 
useful indeed, but sources of disturbance in philosophy. The task of 
philosophy (p. 8) is the task of enlarging and purifying perception. 
In what sense is perception to be purified and enlarged? Not only 
by the reversal of our practical habits, as in Creative Evolution and 
the preceding books, but somewhat as the perception of poets and 
musicians and painters is enlarged by their impartial observation or 
intuition of reality. By this means, says M. Bergson, it shall be 
brought about that "The multiplicity of conceptual systems, strug- 
gling against each other, will be succeeded by a solitary doctrine 
capable of reconciling all thinkers in a single perception" (p. 9). 
And it is not difficult to believe that if the truth of philosophy inheres 
in perception, the contradictory answers to philosophy's problems 
might be reconciled in M. Bergson's intuition, since philosophical 
problems themselves would, on this theory of knowledge, tend like- 
wise to disappear. By this philosophy, says M. Bergson (p. 36), 
"We live more amply, and this superabundance of life brings with 
it the conviction that the most serious enigmas of philosophy can be 
resolved, or, perhaps, that they no longer exist, being born of a stereo- 
typed vision of the universe . . . of a certain artificial weakening 
of our vitality." 

This attitude towards the problems of philosophy seems seriously 
skeptical in its explicit tendency, just as in the theory of knowledge 
elaborated in Time and Free-Will and Matter and Memory, there was 
an implicit skepticism, since the coincidence of subject and object 
leaves no intervening place for relevant error. M. Bergson condemns 
ordinary science because it falls short of his epistemological require- 
ments, but there then remains to him, on his own terms, only an 
absolute immediate which can hardly be true or false, seeing that it 
is not in relation to anything else. The really skeptical upshot of 
his primary assumptions appears, moreover, in V Intuition Philoso- 
phique even more clearly than in La Perception du Changement. 

In Time and Free-Will we observed M. Bergson renouncing the 
possibility of a psychological science of uniqueness by identifying his 
novel psychology with the associationistic or analytical theory of 
mind; and in his subsequent works we observed a repetition of the 
renunciation of the science of uniqueness as strictly conceived. In 
V Intuition du Changement 17 not only does M. Bergson once more 

17 Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, Volume 19, p. 809. 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 63 

renounce his distinction between intuitional knowledge and positive 
science, on which his epistemology rests, but, more plainly than 
elsewhere, he describes the subject-matter of intuition as ineffable, 
and states that the truly philosophical portion of a system of 
philosophy is the expression it gives to the uniqueness of its author's 
personality. 

In this work it is stated (p. 823) that there would not be two modes 
of knowledge, philosophy and science, were there not two forms of 
experience: juxtaposed, repetitious, measurable facts, and pure, con- 
tinuous duration, which is a reciprocal interpenetration of elements, 
refractory to law and measure. Both forms of experience are con- 
sciousness, in the one case, consciousness expanded, in the other, con- 
sciousness contracted. Philosophy is defined (p. 824) as consciousness 
in contact with the contracted form of itself. The renunciation of 
this distinction is given in the further statement (p. 823) that when 
consciousness contracts and gathers itself together it penetrates not 
only into life and reality in general, but also into matter; it is given 
again when M. Bergson says (p. 824) that philosophy is not only a 
contact with concentrated reality, but an impulse which spreads and 
overtakes and molds itself on the outline of science. The philosophical 
intuition is thus from this point of view analytical ; it begins in unity 
and expands. 

But, returning to the other point of view, according to which phil- 
osophy is a contact with reality gathered up into itself, or simply 
reality thus concentrated, we discover M. Bergson explaining at length 
(p. 810) how, by a patient study of the details of a philosophical 
system, one may approach coincidence with the original intuition of 
its author. Should one succeed in coinciding with a philosophy by 
this synthetical process, the philosophy would turn out to be something 
inexpressible (p. 810); something less tangible than an "image fuy 'ante 
et foanouissante" (p. 811); something not veritably connected to the 
temporal and spatial conditions to which it seems attached (p. 812); 
something, in fine (p. 812), independent of other philosophies and of 
positive science and of the very problems on which the philosopher 
was engaged ; the science and the problems being a medium of expres- 
sion that the philosopher chanced to adopt, thanks to the circum- 
stances of his birth. Here more manifestly than anywhere else, we 
have M. Bergson between the horns of his own dilemma: if philoso- 
phy and science are not distinct modes of knowledge, then philosophi- 
cal intuition tells the same story about reality as positive science; if 
they are distinct, philosophy's deliverance is independent of observa- 
tion; it is personal to the individual philosopher (since the problems 



64 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

of science and philosophy are circumstantial to it), and it is incom- 
municable as well. 

Let us now gather together the results of our investigation by 
stating the general characteristics of M. Bergson's epistemology. In 
the light of the preceding evidence we consider that M. Bergson's 
speculation in the theory of knowledge may be described as centrif- 
ugal. The belief that knowledge must absolutely resemble its object 
is central in his thought. From this belief he infers that so-called 
knowledge which analyzes, conceptualizes, selects, alters, or does any- 
thing more or less than coincide with its subject-matter, must be 
unsatisfactory to philosophy. For the most part his expositions are 
an attempt to demonstrate that scientific and ordinary knowledge is 
analytical or selective or conceptual or practical, so that, in the detail 
of his work, M. Bergson recedes, in as many directions as he discovers 
positive characteristics of scientific knowledge, from his central belief. 
He expiates his dereliction, in repeated retrospects, by denying that 
what he has found to be true of the nature of knowledge actually, is 
true from the philosopher's point of view. Hence the major contra- 
dictions of his doctrine. 

For example, he notices that psychology analyzes experience; that 
language itself is an analysis of experience; and that all thought about 
the freedom of the will must go forward in terms that are analytical. 
Having demonstrated these facts he concludes that psychology is not 
really psychology, that language is incommensurable with the truth 
of the mind, and that in order to understand the freedom of the will 
it is necessary, as a preliminary, to give up thinking about the question 
of freedom in terms of thought. Again, he defines perception and 
memory by the selection they practise in the material of experience; 
he points out that physics interprets experience with the aid of an 
abstract or conceptual space. But from these facts he concludes 
that to perceive and remember correctly or philosophically, one must 
invert or undo the structure or habit of one's mind; and that in order 
to be genuinely physics, physics must forget what it has learned of 
experience by the employment of the concept of space. In the same 
way M. Bergson reverts from the fact that not merely psychology, 
but that all natural science and ordinary knowledge is conceptual in 
character, to the inference that the universal employment of con- 
cepts proves all science to be illegitimate philosophically. The para- 
dox reappears in his notion that man coincides with his own life and 
is human truly, only when he suppresses his proper intellectual nature 
and expands the vestige of instinct, which M. Bergson considers to 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 65 

assimilate vertebrates to insects, into a coincidence with the whole 
movement of life. In short the centrifugal character of M. Bergson's 
epistemology leads him to suppose that man can come into genuine 
contact with reality only by ceasing from the activities that determine 
man's position and function in the universe. It may be said in gen- 
eral, then, that M. Bergson throws light on the nature of knowledge 
when the theory of knowledge does not preoccupy his mind; that his 
detailed analyses are usually valid, but that his conclusions therefrom 
are almost invariably false. In their destructive aspect his exposi- 
tions are most often sound, since they attack the assumption that 
ordinary knowledge resembles its object; in their constructive aspect, 
on the other hand, his expositions are inadmissible, since they uniformly 
identify some property of positive science, transferred ambiguously 
from its own to an alien context, with the intuitional knowledge neces- 
sitated by M. Bergson's original premise. 

From the dualistic point of view the centrifugal character of M. 
Bergson's epistemological speculations throws light on a number of 
peculiarities in portions of his work which have been left unmentioned 
hitherto. At the center of his doctrine the belief that reality is incom- 
mensurable with concepts causes M. Bergson to define reality as pure 
uniqueness or an unintermitting ^progress into novelty. Having begun 
by criticizing the science of psychology epistemologically, M. Bergson 
classifies this unique reality as mind ; and his earliest step is a division 
of the terms of experience into a new dualistic mind, on the one hand, 
which comprises no more than uniqueness — denominated pure quality 
or qualitative multiplicity or genuine duration or free-will; and into 
an enlarged material division, on the other hand, which is the whole 
of experience minus uniqueness. As M. Bergson recedes from his 
central epistemological assumption, however, by showing that the 
several sciences of experience define reality in conceptual terms, he 
is forced to transfer to his mental division of dualism, which comprises 
reality, the terms which his original premise forbade to be there. 
Hence he describes reality as becoming what it should never be; he 
treats the world of immediate experience where uniqueness and quan- 
tity are intermingled or confused, as an illegitimate portion of exis- 
tence whose character results from a percolation of matter into mind, 
brought about by habit or stupidity or practical haste. In other 
words, M. Bergson explains the immediate by combining conceptual 
matter and conceptual mind, traversing, in this way, his frequent 
contention that although from reality to concepts the passage is 
possible, there can be no passage from concepts to reality. And he 
is forced to derive experience from concepts, in spite of his view that 



66 LOGIC of bergson's philosophy 

concepts are epistemologically unsatisfactory attenuations of the real, 
inasmuch as he undertakes to reform philosophy by means of the 
dualistic hypothesis, according to which there is a separation between 
the object and subject of knowledge, or matter and mind, though, all 
the time, he believes that knowledge, to be genuine, must coincide 
with its subject-matter. Now, since M. Bergson derives the impor- 
tant elements of his philosophical doctrine, almost without exception, 
from this revision of the dualistic hypothesis, the fundamental pecu- 
liarity of his epistemological speculation reappears in branches of his 
doctrine which might seem to be altogether remote from the theory 
of knowledge. 

This epistemological property of his doctrine is exemplified in his 
treatment of the subject of chance. Supposing what is meant by 
disorder to be the superposition in thought of the vital order, or unique- 
ness, on the material order, or vice versa, M. Bergson concludes that 
disorder can not be veritably conceived ; that it belongs, that is, to the 
illegitimate region of confusion between the divisions of dualism. But 
in essaying further to reduce the notion of chance to this confused or 
illegitimate idea of disorder, M. Bergson draws remarkably near to the 
theory of universal determinism, which is opposed to his fundamental 
theories of novelty and free-will and creative evolution. 

M. Bergson's theory of laughter provides another example of the 
cropping up of the difficulties of his dualism in branches of investiga- 
tion apparently remote from epistemology. He starts out from the 
notion that laughter is a corrector of manners, inciting the members 
of society to modes of behavior conformable to the varying circum- 
stances of community life. In this supposition laughter encourages an 
elastic adaptation of conduct to conditions external to the individual's 
existence. The theory is not elaborated in its integrity by M. Bergson, 
however, since from his epistemological assumption that reality is 
pure uniqueness, he gets carried on to the hypothesis of a life, which, 
to be perfectly real, must be a succession of unique phases; that is to 
say, a succession of attitudes or acts that can not be adapted to a 
common or social criterion, or to groups of circumstances that present 
any aspect of similarity. A parallel difficulty appears in M. Bergson's 
esthetics. On the basis of his epistemological metaphysics he states 
that the function of the artist is to express the unique periods of his 
own personality. But the appreciation of a work of art can not then 
possibly be a duplication in the mind of another person of the expressed 
mood of the artist, since the original mood is by definition unique, and 
consequently M. Bergson is forced to maintain that really to appre- 
ciate a painting, for instance, is not to see what its creator saw, but 



LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 67 

to be encouraged to discern in one's own consciousness something 
else. This difficulty arises from the fact that for combinations of 
repetition and novelty, or of sameness and difference, there is theo- 
retically no place in M. Bergson's philosophy, as we may once more 
note in connection with his proposed solution of the eleatic paradoxes. 
Since the resemblance theory of knowledge, as developed in M. 
Bergson's thought, issues in the conviction that to be genuine, knowl- 
edge must coincide with its object, M. Bergson supposes that each 
reality is the genuine truth of itself. Truth in his hypothesis, conse- 
quently, can not be expressed in terms of a relation holding between 
different realities, and he adopts implicitly the view that predication 
is falsification, since it brings one reality into relation with another 
not itself. The implication manifests itself in connection with the 
criticism of associationistic psychology contained in Time and Free- 
Willy at the points in his exposition where M. Bergson denies that 
pure quality, which is genuine mind, can come into contact with 
quantity. To this very "confusion" of quality and quantity, in fact, M. 
Bergson traces the paradoxes of the eleatic philosophers. 18 And his 
refutation of Zeno consists in denying that motion and the measure 
of motion, or quality and space, can legitimately be related. Zeno 
went wrong, M. Bergson argues, in confusing various motions with 
each other by means of dimensional space; since each motion is in 
reality one and indivisible, and incommensurable with everything else. 
Motion, strictly speaking, is pure unextended mobility, and can not 
be measured, because the "only thing we are able to measure is 
space." 19 Obviously this solution of the paradoxes of Elea is merely 
a restatement in terms of extensity and change, of M. Bergson's con- 
viction that quantity and quality are different and, therefore, quite 
separate from one another; this conviction in turn derives from his 
peculiar theory of epistemological dualism. M. Bergson's refutation 
of Zeno is, therefore, a development of the assumption that in order 
to be true knowledge must absolutely resemble its object. 

We may say in conclusion that the contradictions that split the 
chief branches of M. Bergson's philosophical doctrine into two parts 
originate unexceptionally in his discovery that the knowledge of posi- 
tive science is different from what the resemblance-epistemology 
teaches that knowledge should be. Clinging to his epistemological 
assumption M. Bergson rejects or condemns or disparages the knowl- 
edge of positive science; whenever his philosophy has an alternative 

is Time and Free-Will, p. 74- 
19 Time and Free-Will, p. 230. 



68 LOGIC OF BERGSON'S PHILOSOPHY 

choice between positive science and epistemology, the resemblance- 
epistemology is preferred. But instead of sacrificing knowledge to a 
theory of knowledge it would be possible to shape one's epistemology 
on what an observation of science shows human knowledge to be. 
Only in such a procedure, we believe, could the contradictions and 
difficulties that trouble the course of M. Bergson's speculation in 
philosophy be escaped. 



s y -a8& 



VITA 

George Williams Peckham, Jr., was born April 7, 1885, in Mil- 
waukee, Wisconsin. A. B., University of Wisconsin, 1906; Student, 
University of Chicago, 1905; Harvard Law School, 1906; in Germany, 
1907; in France, 1908; Harvard Graduate School, 1909; in Italy, 
1910; College de France, 1911; Columbia University, 1911-1913; 
Assistant in Philosophy, Columbia University 1913-1915; Lecturer, 
1915-1917. 







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